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THE HIGHER STUDY OP ENGLISH 



THE HIGHER STUDY OF 
ENGLISH 



BY 

ALBERT S. COOK 

Professor of the English Language and Literature in Yale University 




BOSTON, NEW YORK AND CHICAGO 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

1906 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two Copies Received 

OCT 18 1906 

CLASS A XXc^No, 

co/yb. 




COPYRIGHT 1906 BY ALBERT S. COOK 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



Published October igob 



^ 



PREFACE 

The reader who takes up this little book should 
be warned that he must not expect a syste- 
matic treatise. These four papers are of a strictly 
occasional nature, since even the second was writ- 
ten in response to an invitation from the editor 
of the Atlantic Monthly, and the subject of the 
fourth was suggested in the letter which requested 
me to deliver the address. Hence they are not 
mutually exclusive — indeed, the critical reader 
will discover that in some instances they overlap 
— though perhaps they may fairly be said to be 
mutually supplementary. Slight changes have 
been made in the text of the first and second 
papers, and the foot-notes to these are new. Of 
the Vassar address a portion is omitted at the 
beginning. In other respects the papers are re- 
produced essentially without change. 

Albert S. Cook. 
Greensboro, Vermont, 
August 11, 1906. 



CONTENTS 

I. The Province of English Philology . . 1 
II. The Teaching of English 35 

III. The Relation of Words to Literature . 71 

IV. Aims in the Graduate Study of English 99 
Index 143 



I 

THE PROVINCE OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY 



THE PROVINCE OP ENGLISH 
PHILOLOGY 1 

Perhaps no reproach is oftener addressed to 
those who call themselves philologists than that 
they are unconcerned with that beauty which 
has furnished a distinctive epithet for the word 
4 literature ' in the phrase belles-lettres, that they 
lack imagination and insight, and that they are 
quite unfitted to impart to others a sense of the 
spiritual values which inhere in the productions 
that form the subject-matter of their studies. 
An eloquent writer, who is himself a capable 
investigator, has recently presented this view in 
an essay which deserves the attention of every 
teacher of literature, and especially of every 
teacher of English literature. 

I make no apology for quoting a rather long 
extract from the essay in question, since the ar- 
raignment puts into definite form what a good 
many people have been feeling and intimating, 
and the philologist is bound to meet the attack, 
either by mending his ways, or by showing that 

1 Address as President of the Modern Language Association 
of America, at its Annual Meeting held at the University of 
Pennsylvania, December, 1897. 



4 THE PROVINCE OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY 

the critic, with the best intentions in the world, 
has not fully comprehended the purposes of 
philology, or has perhaps taken a part for the 
whole. Here, then, is the passage : 1 

And so very whimsical things sometimes happen, 
because of this scientific and positivist spirit of the 
age, when the study of the literature of any language 
is made part of the curriculum of our colleges. The 
more delicate and subtle purposes of the study are put 
quite out of countenance, and literature is commanded 
to assume the phrases and the methods of science. 
... It is obvious that you cannot have universal 
education without restricting your teaching to such 
things as can be universally understood. It is plain 
that you cannot impart * university methods ' to thou- 
sands, or create ' investigators ' by the score, unless 
you confine your university education to matters 
which dull men can investigate, your laboratory train- 
ing to tasks which mere plodding diligence and sub-, 
missive patience can compass. Yet, if you do so limit 
and constrain what you teach, you thrust taste and 
insight and delicacy of perception out of the schools, 
exalt the obvious and the merely useful aboVe the 
things which are only imaginatively or spiritually con- 
ceived, make education an affair of tasting and hand- 
ling and smelling. . . . 

You have nowadays, it is believed, only to heed the 
suggestions of pedagogics in order to know how to 

1 Woodrow Wilson, Mere Literature, and Other Essays, 1896, 
pp. 2-5. 



SOME OBJECTIONS TO PHILOLOGY 6 

impart Burke or Browning, Dryden or Swift. There 
are certain practical difficulties, indeed ; but there are 
ways of overcoming them. You must have strength 
if you would handle with real mastery the firm fibre 
of these men ; you must have a heart, moreover, to 
feel their warmth, an eye to see what they see, an 
imagination to keep them company, a pulse to expe- 
rience their delights. But if you have none of these 
things, you may make shift to do without them. You 
may count the words they use, instead, note the 
changes of phrase they make in successive revisions, 
put their rhythm into a scale of feet, run their allu- 
sions — particularly their female allusions — to cover, 
detect them in their previous reading. Or, if none of 
these things please you, or you find the big authors 
difficult or dull, you may drag to light all the minor 
writers of their time, who are easy to understand. 1 

1 Compare with this the beginning of his preface to The Eng- 
lish Works of George Herbert (1905), where Professor Palmer, of 
Harvard University, says : ' There are few to whom this book 
will seem worth while. It embodies long labor, spent on a 
minor poet, and will probably never be read entire by any one. 
But that is a reason for its existence. Lavishness is in its aim. 
The book is a box of spikenard, poured in unappeasable love 
over one who has attended my life. . . . There are public 
reasons too. The tendencies of an age appear more distinctly 
in its writers of inferior rank than in those of commanding 
genius. These latter tell of past and future as well as of the 
years in which they live. They are for all time. But on the 
sensitive, responsive souls, of less creative power, current ideals 
record themselves with clearness. Whoever, then, values liter- 
ary history will be glad to seek out the gentle and incomplete 
poet. ... A small writer so studied becomes large.' 



6 THE PROVINCE OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY 

By setting an example in such methods you render 
great services in certain directions. You make the 
higher degrees of our universities available for the 
large number of respectable men who can count, and 
measure, and search diligently ; and that may prove 
no small matter. You divert attention from thought, 
which is not always easy to get at, and fix atten- 
tion upon language, as upon a curious mechanism, 
which can be perceived with the bodily eye, and 
which is worthy to be studied for its own sake, quite 
apart from anything it may mean. You encourage 
the examination of forms, grammatical and metrical, 
which can be quite accurately determined and quite 
exhaustively catalogued. You bring all the visible 
phenomena of writing to light and into ordered sys- 
tem. You go further, and show how to make careful 
literal identification of stories somewhere told ill and 
without art with the same stories told over again by 
the masters, well and. with the transfiguring effect of 
genius. You thus broaden the area of science; for 
you rescue the concrete phenomena of the expres- 
sion of thought — the necessary syllabification which 
accompanies it, the inevitable juxtaposition of words, 
the constant use of particles, the habitual display of 
roots, the inveterate repetition of names, the recurrent 
employment of meanings heard or read — from their 
confusion with the otherwise unclassifiable manifesta- 
tions of what had hitherto been accepted, without 
critical examination, under the lump term 'litera- 
ture,' simply for the pleasure and spiritual edification 
to be got from it. 



THESE OBJECTIONS NOT NEW 7 

This is a stern indictment to bring against 
the philologist — the ■ mere philologist,' as our 
author might say — and if it contains the whole 
truth, and nothing but the truth ; if things are 
quite as bad as here represented, and the fault is 
the fault of certain innovators, who usurp the 
domain of better men with their science falsely 
so-called ; then it behooves us to be on our guard, 
lest we also be entangled in the net they have 
woven for their own feet, and so become involved 
with them in a common destruction. 

Let us first see, however, whether some of 
these matters are susceptible of being differently 
stated. And first, is it quite certain that the 
evils complained of are due to the scientific and 
positivist spirit of this age, and to the effort 
after universal education ? It is more than two 
thousand years since Herodicus described the 
followers of the critic Aristarchus as ' buzzing 
in corners, busy with monosyllables.' It is more 
than eighteen hundred years since Seneca thus 
declaimed ' against what he understood by the 
philological study of literature : 

A grammarian occupies himself with the care of 
speech, or, if he takes a wider view of his art, pos- 
sibly with history. The most that he can do is to 
extend its limits so as to include poetry. Which of 

1 Epist. 88, somewhat freely translated (Camelot Series) by 
Walter Clode, following Thomas Lodge. 



8 THE PROVINCE OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY ' 

these openeth a way to virtue ? Doth the unfolding 
of syllables, the niceties of speech, the memory of 
fables, or the law and syntax of verses? Which of 
these taketh away fear, casteth out covetousness, 
bridleth lust? . . . Let us grant unto them that 
Homer was a philosopher ; in that case he must have 
learnt wisdom before he wrote poetry ; wherefore let 
us learn those things which made Homer a wise man. 
. . . What supposest thou that it profiteth to inquire 
into the ages of Patroclus and Achilles? Seekest 
thou rather Ulysses' errors than seest how thou canst 
prevent thine own? There is no time for hearing 
whether Ulysses was shipwrecked between Italy and 
Sicily, or passed the boundaries of the known world. 
. . . Tempests of the mind do daily toss us, and vice 
driveth us into all the evils which Ulysses suffered. 
Beauty there is to beguile the eyes, and she cometh 
not in the guise of a foe : hence come cruel monsters, 
which delight in men's blood ; hence come deceitful 
allurements of the ears; hence shipwrecks, and so 
many varieties of evil. Teach me this thing — how I 
may love my country, my wife, and my father ; how 
even suffering shipwreck, I may steer my ship into 
so virtuous a haven. 

Here, then, is a strong argument against lit- 
erary scholarship. Observe at once its admira- 
ble cogency and its comprehensive sweep. The 
goal of all education should be to render men 
wise and virtuous ; therefore wisdom and virtue 
should be taught directly, to the exclusion of all 



SENECA'S VIEWS 9 

other matters. How obvious and how convincing ! 
The objection to literary scholarship has the 
same force as applied to other studies. This is 
apparent from the very title of Seneca's essay, 
That the Liberal Arts are not to be classed 
among Good Things, and contribute Nothing to 
Virtue. But let us hear his own application of 
the principle — enounced earlier by Diogenes the 
Cynic — to the study of music and geometry : 

Let us pass to geometry and music ; nothing shalt 
thou find in them which forbiddeth fear, or forbid- 
deth covetousness, of which whosoever is ignorant, in 
vain knoweth other things. . . . Thou teachest me 
how there cometh a harmony from sharp and bass 
sounds, and how a chord may be composed of disso- 
nant strings. Do thou make rather that my mind may 
be in harmony with itself, and that my counsels be 
not out of time. . . . Thou knowest what a straight 
line is ; what profiteth it thee, if thou art ignorant of 
what is crooked in life ? 

But there is another argument against all 
learning, or rather against all learning except 
philosophy. Learning is a positive incumbrance. 
The mind is limited in its capacity. There 
is only a given amount of space in the mind 
to include everything. All the room occupied 
by learning is so much subtracted from that 
which might have harbored virtue. Hear once 
more the incomparable Seneca : ' Of whatsoever 



10 THE PROVINCE OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY 

part of divine and human affairs thou takest 
hold, thou shalt be wearied with the huge abun- 
dance of things to be sought out and to be 
learned. . . . Virtue will not lodge itself in so 
narrow a room ; a great matter desireth a large 
space ; let all else be driven out, let the whole 
breast be empty for it.' 

With Seneca, the conclusion of the whole mat- 
ter is extremely simple. Philosophy is the science 
which teaches wisdom and virtue. Therefore 
neglect everything else, and study philosophy. 
In his own words : 

Philosophy . . . raiseth the whole structure, 
foundations and all. Mathematics, so to speak, is 
a superficial art ; it buildeth upon another's founda- 
tions, it receiveth its principles from others, by the 
benefit of which it cometh to further conclusions. If, 
by its own exertions, it could come to truth, if it 
could comprehend the nature of the whole world, 
I should be more grateful to it. The mind is made 
perfect by one thing — namely, by the unchangeable 
knowledge of good and bad things, for which alone 
philosophy is competent. But none other art inquireth 
about good and bad things. 

But, unfortunately, the trail of the serpent is 
over philosophy, even. Seneca cannot help ad- 
mitting that his very philosophers are not quite 
what they should be. 4 I speak,' says he, 'of 
liberal studies ; how much of what is useless do 



WISDOM WITHOUT LEARNING? 11 

philosophers possess, how much of what is un- 
practical ! They also have descended to the dis- 
tinction of syllables, and to the proprieties of 
conjunctions and prepositions, and to envy gram- 
marians, to envy geometricians. . . . Thus it 
is come to pass that, with all their diligence, they 
know rather to speak than to live.' 

Now I would not be understood as institut- 
ing a parallel in all respects between the able 
and brilliant writer first quoted, with certain of 
whose positions I find myself in agreement, and 
the moralist who thus ruthlessly, like another 
Caliph Omar, would sweep away all learning 
from the face of the earth. Yet I cannot help 
seeing in the essay of the former an implication 
that taste and insight and delicacy of perception 
shall be imparted directly by the schools, in a 
manner not dissimilar, it may be apprehended, 
to that in which the Senecan wisdom and virtue 
were to be taught. Perhaps this is possible; I 
would that it were. Is there one who listens to 
me who would not gladly devote his whole ener- 
gies to the direct communication of taste and in- 
sight and delicacy of perception, and still more 
of wisdom and virtue, were that possible without 
the adventitious aid of learning? If we could 
train the mind to exact and severe thinking, to 
endure the toil involved in continuous attention 
to the same subject, without invoking the pro- 



12 THE PROVINCE OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY 

cesses of mathematical science, or any equivalent 
discipline, to come to our assistance, how the col- 
lege curriculum might speedily be relieved of one 
of its heaviest burdens ! But we have already seen 
that even Seneca's philosophers were not quite 
equal to his demands ; they also ' descended to 
the distinction of syllables, and to the proprieties 
of conjunctions and prepositions.' These philoso- 
phers must have felt, at least, after Seneca's 
rebuke, how far they were derogating from the 
inwardness of their mission. Yet, if they lived 
a quarter of a century longer, they were surely 
not a little comforted by the utterances of Quin- 
tilian, who in one place says : * 

Was Cicero the less of an orator because he was 
most attentive to the study of grammar, and because, 
as appears from his letters, he was a rigid exactor, on 
all occasions, of correct language from his son ? Did 
the writings of Julius Csesar On Analogy diminish 
the vigor of his intellect ? Or was Messala less ele- 
gant as a writer because he devoted whole books, not 
merely to single words, but even to single letters? 
These studies are injurious, not to those who pass 
through them, but to those who dwell immoderately 
on them. 

But are modern times barren of such instances 
as Quintilian has noted ? Milton, great poet that 
he was, did not disdain to write an Accidence 
1 Inst. 1. 7. 34, 35. 



DANTE ON THE ITALIAN LANGUAGE 13 

commenced Grammar, and I have never heard 
that his poetry was the worse for it. Milton's 
exemplar, the first poet of Italy, a man eminent 
for taste and insight and delicacy of perception, 
as well as for wisdom and virtue, wrote a book 
On the Vernacular Language, which he began 
on this wise : 

Since we do not find that any one before us has 
treated of the science of the ve macular language, while 
in fact we see that this tongue is highly necessary for 
all, inasmuch as not only men, but even women and 
children, strive, in so far as nature allows them, to 
acquire it ; and since it is our wish to enlighten to 
some little extent the discernment of those who walk 
through the streets like blind men, generally fancying 
that those things which are really in front of them 
are behind them ; we will endeavor, the Word aiding 
us from heaven, to be of service to the vernacular 
speech ; not only drawing the water of our own wit 
for such a drink, but mixing with it the best of what 
we have taken or compiled from others. 

In this work, he whom the difficulties of lan- 
guage had never prevented from saying just 
what he desired to say, went on to write chapters 
whose titles are such as these : ' On the Dialect 
of Romagna, and Some of the Dialects beyond 
the Po, especially the Venetian ; ' ' Of the Struc- 
ture of the Lines, and their Variation by means 
of Syllables ; ' ' Of what Lines Stanzas are made, 



14 THE PROVINCE OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY 

and of the Number of Syllables in the Lines ; ' 
1 Of the Relation of the Rimes, and in what 
order they are to be placed in the Stanza ; ' 
8 Of the Number of Lines and Syllables in the 
Stanza.' Does it not look as though Dante had, 
in the words of our critic, come perilously near 
to rescuing from their confusion with literature 
'the concrete phenomena of the expression of 
thought — the necessary syllabification which 
accompanies it, the inevitable juxtaposition of 
words ' ? 

Passing over such men as Ben Jonson, who 
wrote an English grammar, and made an exten- 
sive collection of the grammars of various lan- 
guages, but at the same time set the fashions in 
English literature for several decades, let us 
dwell for a moment on the authors cited above 
as deserving better treatment than they are likely 
to receive at the hands of the modern expositor. 
Is it possible that the attitude of Burke and 
Browning, of Dryden and Swift, toward philo- 
logical investigation, is in any respect similar to 
that of Dante and of Milton ? I turn to Burke's 
essay On the Sublime and Beautiful, and find 
such headings as these: 'Color considered as 
productive of the Sublime ; ' ' Smell and Taste ; 
Bitters and Stenches ; ' ' The Effect of Words ; ' 
' How Words influence the Passions.' Moreover, 
I find in this work such passages as the follow- 



DRYDEN AS A PHILOLOGIST 15 

ing : ' ' It is hard to repeat certain sets of words, 
though owned by themselves unoperative, with- 
out being in some degree affected, especially if 
a warm and affecting tone of voice accompanies 
them ; as suppose, — 

Wise, valiant, generous, good, and great. 

These words, by having no application, ought to 
be unoperative ; but when words commonly sa- 
cred to great occasions are used, we are affected 
by them even without the occasions.' 

I turn to Browning, and, reading The Gram- 
marian's Funeral, cannot doubt that he was in 
sympathy with the character he has so vividly 
and feelingly delineated. 

I turn to Dryden, and find him writing in this 
vein : 2 * Thus it appears necessary that a man 
should be a nice critic in his mother tongue be- 
fore he attempts to translate a foreign language. 
Neither is it sufficient that he be able to judge 
of words and style, but he must be a master of 
them too; he must perfectly understand his 
author's tongue, and absolutely command his 
own.' Again he says : 4 All the versification and 
little variety of Claudian is included within the 
compass of four or five lines, and then he begins 
again in the same tenor ; perpetually closing his 
sense at the end of a verse, and that verse com- 

1 Part 5, sect. 3. 2 Essay on Translation, 



16 THE PROVINCE OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY 

monly what they call golden, or two substantives 
and two adjectives, with a verb betwixt them to 
keep the peace.' Does not this look like the pre- 
figurement of a modern inquiry into end-stopped 
and run-on lines ? 

I turn to Swift, and am reminded by the re- 
vival of the proposition to establish an English 
Academy that he wrote a Proposal for cor- 
recting, improving, and ascertaining the Eng- 
lish Tongue, involving the creation of a society 
similar to the French Academy for that pur- 
pose. 

Even the author who instances Burke and 
Browning, Dryden and Swift, as writers who 
should be interpreted in a larger and freer man- 
ner, is willing, in a noble oration, to affirm: 
'What you cannot find a substitute for is the 
classics as literature ; and there can be no first- 
hand contact with that literature if you will not 
master the grammar and the syntax which con- 
vey its subtle power.' From this it would appear 
that it is proper to master the grammar and syn- 
tax of the ancient classics ; which he who will 
may harmonize with the objections which were 
quoted at the beginning of these remarks. 

Recalling those objections, we have seen that 
they were in some measure anticipated centuries 
ago ; that Seneca would have had all ancillary 
study of literature replaced by the direct inculca- 



WHY DOES LEARNING SURVIVE? 17 

tion of the essential qualities or virtues that lit- 
erature embodies ; that his criticism held equally 
true of all liberal studies except philosophy, and 
that even philosophy was not exempt from his 
censure ; but that, on the other hand, some of 
the noblest statesmen, orators, and poets have 
busied themselves with the very inquiries which 
we have heard so unsparingly condemned ; and 
that we are thus presented with the singular 
anomaly that that is forbidden to the humble 
expounder of classic authors which was practised 
and recommended by the classical authors them- 
selves ; and that is forbidden to the student of 
our own literature which is reckoned, by the 
same authority, as highly laudable in a student 
of the masterpieces of antiquity. 

There must, one would infer, be something 
inherently attractive and valuable about learn- 
ing which enables it to survive such attacks as 
those of Seneca ; there must be something inher- 
ently attractive and valuable about the learning 
which occupies itself with literature, to make it 
the concern of so many magnanimous spirits, 
and to extort vindications from the antagonists 
who come out armed to destroy it. Perhaps the 
explanation is to be sought in Aristotle's famous 
sentence, 'All men by nature desire to know.' 
Perhaps the justification has been furnished 
by Seneca himself, who elsewhere asks why we 



18 THE PROVINCE OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY 

instruct our children in liberal studies, and 
answers, 'Not because they can give virtue, but 
because they prepare the mind to the receiving 
of it.' Possibly, then, virtue may sometimes be 
best suggested by indirection ; perhaps, too, the 
same is true of taste and insight ; it may be that 
they come not with observation, or at least not 
exclusively with observation ; it may be that they 
who devotedly study any aspect of great works 
receive of their spirit, even as one may approach 
the one spirit of Nature through the different 
channels of astronomy, chemistry, and zoology. 
A lover of literature and of all forms of beauty, 
too early lost to his University and the world — 
I refer to the late Professor McLaughlin — in an 
essay in which he pleaded for the recognition of 
the spiritual element in literature, was yet fain 
to admit : * ' The first steps toward the desired 
results must be prosaic ; people must train them- 
selves, or be trained, to see what is on the sur- 
face, to grow conscious of metrical differences, 
for instance ; not to remain quite blind to the 
real meaning beneath a figurative turn ; even to 
come to recognize that there is a figurative turn.' 
If we could take this view to heart, perhaps 
the difficulties which perplex so many earnest 
seekers after truth, as they consider the subject, 
would vanish away, or at any rate become less 

1 Literary Criticism for Students, pp. viii, ix. 



ATTAINMENT IS A GRADUAL PROCESS 19 

formidable. According to this mode of looking 
at the matter, taste and insight and delicacy of 
perception are by no means common in an era of 
universal education, nor indeed in any era what- 
ever ; the person who possesses them in only a 
rudimentary degree is as likely to be repelled as 
attracted by a sudden revelation of their austere 
charms ; in this, as in everything else, the natu- 
ral progress is by easy stages from the phenome- 
nal to the noumenal, from the things of sense 
to the things of the spirit ; and accordingly the 
science which undertakes to deal with the forms 
in which the human spirit has, in various epochs, 
manifested itself, especially through the medium 
of literature, must be prepared to take account 
of the phenomenal no less than the noumenal, and 
accompany the seeker along the whole scale of 
ascent from the one to the other. 

But is there any such science ? There is ; its 
name is Philology ; and in no other sense than 
as designating this science should the term 
4 philology ' be used, unless with some qualifying 
term which limits its meaning in a specific and 
unmistakable manner. * 

The function of the philologist, then, is the "n 
endeavor to relive the life of the past ; to enter 
by the imagination into the spiritual experiences 
of all the historic protagonists of civilization in 
a given period and area of culture ; to think the 



20 THE PROVINCE OF ENGILSH PHILOLOGY 

thoughts, to feel the emotions, to partake the 
aspirations, recorded in literature; to become 
one with humanity in the struggles of a given 
riation or race to perceive and attain the ideal 
of existence; and then to judge rightly these 
various disclosures of the human spirit, and to 
reveal to the world their true significance and 
relative importance. 

In compassing this end, the philologist will 
have much to do ; much that is not only labori- 
ous, but that even, in itself considered, might 
justly be regarded as distasteful, or even re- 
pellent. He must examine and compare the 
records of the human spirit bequeathed us by 
the past, and, before doing this, must often 
exhume them perhaps, in a mutilated condition, 
from the libraries and monasteries where they 
may have been moldering for ages ; he must piece 
them together, where they have been separated 
and dispersed ; interpret them ; correct their 
manifest errors, so far as this may safely be done 
in the light of fuller information; determine 
their meaning and their worth ; and then deliver 
them to the world, freed, as far as may be, from 
the injuries inflicted by time and evil chance, 
with their sense duly ascertained, their message 
clearly set forth, and their contribution to the 
sum of human attainment justly and sympathet- 
ically estimated. 



WHAT IS THE PHILOLOGIST? 21 

This is the work that has been done, and is 
still in process of doing, for the Sacred Scrip- 
tures ; for Homer, Sophocles, and Pindar among 
the Greeks ; for Virgil, Lucretius, Tacitus, and 
Juvenal among the Romans; for the Italian 
Dante and Ariosto; for the French Chansons 
de Geste, no less than for Ronsard, Moliere, and 
Rousseau; for the Nibelungenlied and Goethe 
among the Germans; for Cynewulf, Chaucer, 
Shakespeare, and Milton among the English; 
and for a multitude of others of whom these 
may stand as types. 

The ideal philologist is at once antiquary, 
palaeographer, grammarian, lexicologist, ex- 
pounder, critic, historian of literature, and, 
above all, lover of humanity. He should have 
the accuracy of the scientist, the thirst for dis- 
covery of the Arctic explorer, the judgment of 
the man of affairs, the sensibility of the musician, 
the taste of the connoisseur, and the soul of the 
poet. He must shrink from no labor, and despise 
no detail, by means of which he may be enabled 
to reach his goal more surely, and laden with 
richer results. Before traversing unknown seas, 
he must appropriate every discovery made by his 
predecessors on similar quests, and avail him- 
self of every improvement upon their methods 
wljich his imagination can suggest, and his 
judgment approve. He will be instant in season 



22 THE PROVINCE OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY 

and out of season. Whatsoever his hand finds 
to do he will do with his might. He will choose 
the task which humanity most needs to have 
performed, and at the same time that in which 
his own powers and special equipment can be 
most fully utilized ; and, when possible, he will 
give the preference to such labors as shall 
afford play and outreach to his nobler faculties, 
rather than to such as may dwarf and impov- 
erish them. 

According to the exigencies which circum- 
stances create, or his own intuition perceives, he 
will edit dictionaries, like Johnson or Mur- 
ray; make lexicons to individual authors, like 
Schmidt ; compile concordances, like Bartlett or 
Ellis ; investigate metre, like Sievers or Schip- 
per ; edit authors, as Skeat has edited Chaucer, 
Child the English and Scottish Ballads, and 
Furness Shakespeare ; discourse on the laws of 
literature, like Sidney, or Ben Jonson, or Lewes, 
or Walter Pater ; write -literary biography, like 
Brandl or Dowden ; or outline the features and 
progress of a national literature, like Ten Brink, 
or Stopford Brooke, or Taine. 

The ideal philologist must, therefore, have 
gained him * the gains of various men, ransacked 
the ages, spoiled the climes.' Yet withal he must 
be content, if fortune, or his sense of a potential 
universe hidden in his apparently insignificant 



PHILOLOGISTS SOMETIMES WRITE WELL 23 

task, will have it so, merely to settle hoWs busi- 
ness, properly base oun, or give us the doctrine 
of the enclitic de — sure that posterity, while it 
may ungratefully forget him, will at least have 
cause to bless his name, as that of one without 
whose strenuous and self-sacrificing exertions 
the poets, the orators, the historians, and the 
philosophers would have less completely yielded 
up their meaning, or communicated their inspira- 
tion, to an expectant and needy world. 

That the philologist, as such, is not necessarily 
a creative literary artist, is no impugnment of 
his mission or its importance. Neither is he 
who expounds the law, or the doctrines of Chris- 
tianity, necessarily a creative literary artist. Yet 
he may be ; Erskine was, and Webster ; and so 
were Robert South and Cardinal Newman in 
their sermons. To be learned is not necessarily 
to be dull, for Burke was learned, and Chaucer, 
and Cicero, and Homer. Petrarch was not dull ; 
and all the philology of modern times goes back 
to Petrarch. 

If we seek for philologists who may fairly be 
ranked among reputable authors, the brothers 
Grimm wrote fairy stories quite as charmingly 
as Perrault; Hallam says of Politian that his 
poem displayed more harmony, spirit, and ima- 
gination than any that had been written since 
the death of Petrarch ; and the same writer calls 



24 THE PROVINCE OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY 

the History and Annals of Grotius a monument 
of vigorous and impressive language. Professor 
Lounsbury says of Tyrwhitt, ' His literary taste 
can be described as almost unerring.' The style 
of Erasmus has been called clear, lively, expres- 
sive rather than regular, sparkling with sallies 
and verve, Sainte-Beuve, who by his profes- 
sion of critic comes well within the definition of 
the philologist, is of course one of the literary 
glories of France. Croiset, the author of La 
Poesie de Pindare, is an author whom one finds 
it difficult to lay down when his book has once 
been taken in hand. Sellar's accounts of the 
Roman poets can be read with the utmost plea- 
sure by any one at all interested in the subject. 
The charm of Max Muller's writing is well 
known. One might go on to enumerate Jebb, 
and Gildersleeve, and Jowett, and Mahaffy — 
but why extend a list which any one can con- 
tinue for himself? Enough has been said to 
show that the pursuit of philology is not incom- 
patible with literary power and grace — as why 
indeed should it be ? 

But it has been observed that dull men crowd 
into the profession, men who can only count and 
catalogue, or who, to employ the language of 
Chapman in The Revenge of Bussy d'Ambois, 1 
are 

1 Act 2, scene 1. 



WHY SOME PHILOLOGISTS ARE DULL 25 

Of taste so much depraved, that they had rather 
Delight, and satisfy themselves to drink 
Of the stream troubled, wandering ne'er so far 
From the clear fount, than of the fount itself. 

Alas, it is but too true ! Heaven-sent geniuses 
are rare, and there is not room for all the dull 
men in the other professions. Moreover, great 
poets are sometimes averse to spending their 
lives in the professor's chair, when they can 
write Idylls of the King and Men and Women. 
Also, there is no recipe by which to convert dull 
men into heaven-sent geniuses, and the prepon- 
derance of the former class everywhere is an evil 
not sufficiently to be deplored. Then, too, some 
of us must do the intellectual hewing of wood 
and drawing of water for the rest, and how 
should this be were no dull men to interest them- 
selves in literature ? Finally, we can always fall 
back upon the reasons assigned by Longinus — 
if it was indeed he who wrote the immortal 
Treatise on the Sublime — Longinus, a man 
whom Plotinus allowed to be a philologist, but 
in no sense a philosopher. Thus he moralizes: 
'It is a matter of wonder that in the present 
age, which produces many highly skilled in the 
arts of popular persuasion, many of keen and 
active powers, many especially rich in every 
pleasing gift of language, the growth of highly 
exalted and wide-reaching genius has, with a few 



26 THE PROVINCE OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY 

rare exceptions, almost entirely ceased. ... It 
is so easy, and so characteristic of human nature, 
always to find fault with the present. Consider, 
now, whether the corruption of genius is to be 
attributed, not to a world-wide peace, but rather 
to the war within us which knows no limit, which 
engages all our desires, yes, and still further to 
the bad passions which lay siege to us to-day, 
and make utter havoc and spoil of our lives. 
Are we not enslaved, nay, are not our careers 
completely shipwrecked, by love of gain, that 
fever which rages unappeased in us all, and love 
of pleasure ? — one the most debasing, the other 
the most ignoble, of the mind's diseases.' If 
there are no better men forthcoming as expound- 
ers of English literature, may it not be that the 
requisite talents are attracted to more lucrative 
pursuits rather than that the fault is with the 
tendency of education to become universal ? 

It is singular, however, that men whom no one 
would think of calling dull practise on occasion 
the arts that we have heard condemned. Thus 
Professor Dowden, in his very newest book, his 
volume of selections from Wordsworth, 1 so far 
from thinking it a sin, in dealing with the 
poets, to ' note the changes of phrase they make 
in successive revisions,' expressly says, 'From 
no other English poet can lessons in the poetic 
1 Poems by William Wordsworth, p. lxxxv. 



PHILOLOGY NOT MERELY LINGUISTICS 27 

craft so full, so detailed, and so instructive be 
obtained as those to be had by one who follows 
Wordsworth through the successive editions, and 
puts to himself the repeated question, "For 
what reason was this change, for what reason 
was that, introduced ? " ' Gaston Paris, too, who 
is said to be unsurpassed as a lecturer on the 
felicities of style, is best known to the world 
by researches which quite surely fall under the 
condemnation already cited. 

Philology is frequently considered to be iden- 
tical with linguistics. This is an error which 
cannot be sufficiently deprecated. It results in 
the estrangement of the study of language from 
that of literature, with which, in the interests of 
both, it should be most intimately associated. 
*The study of language is apt to seem arid and 
repellent to those who do not perceive how essen- 
tial it is to the comprehension of literature. The 
conception of linguistics as a totally independent 
branch of learning, and the bestowal upon it of 
the appellation which properly designates the 
whole study of the history of culture, especially 
through the medium of literature, is fraught 
with incalculable injury to the pursuit of both 
divisions of the subject. Professor Saintsbury 
deplores this separation in a recent work. He 
says too truly: 1 'With some honorable excep- 

1 History of Nineteenth Century Literature, p. 460. 



28 THE PROVINCE OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY 

tions, we find critics of literature too often di- 
vided into linguists who seem neither to think 
nor to be capable of thinking of the meaning or 
the melody, of the individual and technical mas- 
tery, of an author, a book, or a passage, and into 
loose aesthetic rhetoricians who will sometimes 
discourse on iEschylus without knowing a sec- 
ond aorist from an Attic perfect, and pronounce 
eulogies or depreciations on Virgil without hav- 
ing the faintest idea whether there is or is not 
any authority for quamvis with one mood rather 
than another.' He adds : ' It is not wonderful, 
though it is in the highest degree unhealthy, 
that the stricter scholars should be more or less 
scornfully relinquishing the province of literary 
criticism altogether, while the looser aesthetics 
consider themselves entitled to neglect scholar- 
ship in any proper sense with a similarly scorn- 
ful indifference.' 

I hope we shall all concur with Professor 
Saintsbury in this opinion. Such mutual dis- 
trust, not to say dislike, is in the highest degree 
unhealthy. Why should not all thoughtful stu- 
dents of English call themselves philologists, 
and thus recognize that they are all virtually 
aiming at the same thing, notwithstanding that 
they approach the subject from different points 
of view, and in practice emphasize different 
aspects of their common theme ? 



PROPOSED DEFINITION NOT NEW 29 

It may perhaps be objected that this would be 
equivalent to attributing an arbitrary and novel 
signification to the word philology. In this pre- 
sence, I need only advert to the fact that in Ger- 
many the meaning I advocate is recognized as 
the only tenable one by all the recent authori- 
ties. More than a hundred years ago, Wolf, 
acting in part under the inspiration of Goethe, 
outlined the conception which in more recent 
times has been developed by Boeckh, and from 
him has been adopted by all the chief authors 
or editors of systematic treatises dealing with 
the philology of the various nations or races. 
While they differ more or less with respect to 
the expediency of including certain subdivisions 
of this department of knowledge in their survey, 
on the essential point such scholars as Paul, 
Grober, Korting, and Elze, all agree. No one 
who has not reflected long and deeply upon the 
conception elaborated by Boeckh can realize 
how fruitful it proves, and how fully it satisfies 
the demand for a philosophy of our work which 
shall recognize at once the part played in its 
advancement by the intuitions of genius and 
by the humbler labors of the compiler and sys- 
tematizer. 

Many people are misled by forming a wrong no- 
tion of the etymology of the term we have been 
discussing. ■ Does not Aoyos mean " word " ? ' 



30 THE PROVINCE OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY 

say they ; ' how then can philology signify any- 
thing else than a study of words ? ' — whereupon 
they complacently identify philology with ety- 
mology. But the initial mistake is a serious one. 
If one traces the use of faXoXoyU and <faX6Xoyos 
in classical Greek and Latin, he will find some- 
thing quite different. The philologist was ori- 
ginally one who loved the tales of history or 
old romance, and then one who was fond of all 
sorts of learning which naturally grew out of 
this love for dwelling on the records of the past. 
Thus a philologist was distinctively literary in 
his tastes ; not always philosophical, but always 
prevailingly literary. Since literature employed 
speech as its medium, he of course became an 
investigator of speech, but — and this is a most 
important consideration -£his interest in lan- 
guage grew out of his interest in literature, and 
his dominant concern with language was in its 
capacity as the organ of literary communication^ 
Boeckh has pointed out that a compound which 
would have expressed to the ancients what 
we often mean by linguistic study would have 
had to be formed with yXwa-a-a — like our ' glos- 
sonomy ' — and not with Aoyos. It is the use of 
the expression 'comparative philology' in the 
sense of 'glossonomy' or 'glossology' which 
has wrought the mischief. If one regards Xoyos 
as standing for the typical revelation of itself by 



THE PHILOLOGIST A LOVER 



31 



the human soul, and also for the faculty chiefly 
instrumental in effecting this revelation — for 
oratio and ratio, as the Romans said — the term 
philology assumes its rightful dignity and 
breadth, and designates one of the noblest em- 
ployments to which a human being can dedicate 
himself. He who cherishes this ideal will not 
thereby become an ideal philologist, but he will 
be less likely to strive as one that beateth the 
air ; he will perceive that his ultimate concern 
is with the human soul, and all his collecting, 
and comparing, and criticizing, will subserve 
the one end of enabling the voices of the past, 
and especially the thrilling and compelling voices, 
to sound more audibly and tunefully in the ear 
of his own and future generations. 

We must never forget that the philologist is 
a lover. As Pythagoras was not willing to be 
called a wise man, but only a lover of wisdom, 
and thus coined the word philosophy, so the 
philologist may well be content to call himself a 
lover too — a lover of the thrilling and compelling 
voices of the past. He becomes a philologist, if 
he is worthy of the name, because they have 
thrilled and compelled him ; and he would fain 
devise means, however circuitous in appearance, 
by which to insure that they shall thrill and 
compel others. His sensibility is the measure of 
his devotion ; and his devotion, while it may not 



32 THE PROVINCE OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY 

be the measure of his success, is certainly its 
indispensable condition. 

If then, philology, truly considered, enlists 
the head in the service of the heart; if it de- 
mands not only high and manifold discipline, 
but rich natural endowment ; if its object is the 
revelation to the present of the spiritual attain- 
ments of the past ; if it aims to win free access 
for the thoughts of the mightiest thinkers, and 
the dreams of the most visionary of poets ; if it 
seeks to train the imagination to re-create the 
form and pressure of a vanished time, in order 
to stimulate our own age to equal or surpass its 
predecessors in whatever best illustrates and 
enobles humanity; if there are not wanting 
numerous examples of poets who have been phi- 
lologists, and philologists who have been essen- 
tially poets ; and, finally, if philology is the only 
term which thus fully comprehends these various 
aspects of a common subject, and we have the 
most authoritative precedents for employing it 
in that signification ; shall we willingly allow the 
word to be depreciated, and the largeness and 
unity of the corresponding conception imperiled, 
by consenting to employ it for the designation 
of a single branch of the comprehensive whole, 
and that the branch which, to the popular appre- 
hension, least exhibits the real import and aim 
of the science ? If not, and we are willing to be 



AGREEMENT DESIRABLE 33 

known as philologists in the truer and larger 
sense, can we not do something to make this 
sense the prevalent one, by consistently adhering 
to it in our practice, and, so far as possible, in- 
ducing others to accept and adopt it ? By thus 
doing, we shall not only be recognizing a truth 
which is indisputable, but also be promoting that 
harmony of opinions and sentiments without 
which the most strenuous individual efforts are 
certain to prove in some degree nugatory. 



n 

THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH 



THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH 1 

English literature sprang at the outset from 
the impulse felt by an untutored Yorkshire 
peasant, in the seventh century of our era, to 
express in the vernacular his sense of the power 
and goodness of God, as manifested in the work 
of creation. His disposition and ability thus to 
employ his native speech were immediately util- 
ized by the abbess and philanthropic scholars 
of a neighboring monastery in the rendering of 
Scriptural narrative and homiletic reflections 
into Northumbrian alliterative verse, having in 
view the moral improvement of the common 
people, to whom Latin was an unknown tongue. 
Throughout the Old English period — say to 
the Norman Conquest — this effort to popularize 
the treasures of Christian learning, which other- 
wise must have remained the exclusive property 
of the scholarly few, is accountable for the chief 
part of the literature produced. The clergy were 
ordered to repeat the Creed and the Lord's 
Prayer in English ; homilies were composed in 
it ; Bede's church history, Pope Gregory's Pas- 
1 Atlantic Monthly, May, 1901. 



38 THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH 

toral Care, and Boethius' Consolation of Phi- 
losophy were translated by Alfred, or under his 
supervision ; the lives of saints and Biblical 
personages were written in prose or paraphrased 
in verse ; the poor, in all ways, had the gospel 
preached to them. On the other hand, the tribal 
kings compiled codes of customary law, embody- 
ing the legal practices which prevailed among 
an unsophisticated folk, and comprehending the 
few and simple relations which the members of 
a tribe or province sustained to one another. 
Add the first annalistic jottings of historical 
occurrences, and the poems dealing with the 
exploits of popular heroes, and you have all, 
and more than all, that can fairly be termed 
oelles-lettres down to near the period of the 
Norman Conquest. It was a literature of the 
people and for the people, and at least to some 
extent, as in the case of Csedmon, by the people. 

Centuries passed, and the institutions which 
had once represented enlightenment and ad- 
vancement were now either become corrupt, 
or seemed likely to oppose further progress. 
Reform was inevitable, and reform at length 
arrived. • 

What we call the Eeformation was an upris- 
ing of the people against the privileged classes 
— against the degenerate monastic orders and 
the rule of Rome, but also, as the sequel showed, 











4 




C-V*>5 


■me-r^o 






' 


pror 


%*' 


' 


3w 


ppr«-&* 







THE REVIVAL OF OLD ENGLISH 39 

against absolute monarchy and feudal oppression. 
Rome professed to be exercising only her imme- 
morial rights ; monarchy and feudalism insisted 
that they were the very institutions by which 
England had always been governed. Appeal 
was made against both to English antiquity, to 
the literature of the pre-Norman period ; and 
thus it happened that in the wreck of the monas- 
tic houses, when the Reformers were reforming 
so much out of existence, it was precisely the Old 
English manuscripts which stood the best chance 
of preservation, and which — though many were 
doubtless lost — were collected and treasured up 
by Leland, Archbishop Parker, Joscelin, and 
their assistants. Lambarde published the Old 
English laws, Parker the life of Alfred writ- 
ten by Asser, Parker and Foxe the Old English 
translation of the Gospels, Parker and Joscelin 
iElfric's Paschal Homily and other writings 
bearing on the question of transubstantiation, 
and Hakluyt the voyage of Ohthere in a trans- 
lation from the account by King Alfred — all 
before the year 1600. English scholarship — by 
which I here mean scholarship having reference 
to the English language and literature — had 
thus made a definite beginning between the birth 
of Shakespeare and the death of Elizabeth. As 
Old English literature was of and for the people, 
so English scholarship originated in obedience 



40 THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH 

to the democratic instinct, and was the creation 
of a popular want. It was evoked to overthrow 
sacerdotalism and to undermine prescriptive rule 
of every sort, and it is not surprising that its 
influence has been in the main, though not with- 
out marked exceptions, to this effect. 

Being thus democratic in origin, it is but 
natural that the systematic study and teaching 
of English have had to contend with the indif- 
ference or opposition of the Roman Church, the 
aristocracy, and the supporters of the ancient 
classics. Thus, notwithstanding the fact that a 
great body of mediaeval English literature is 
monastic or ecclesiastical in character, we do 
not find that many distinguished Roman Cath- 
olic scholars have been engaged in editing or 
expounding it. 1 In like manner, the teaching of 
English prevails much more widely in America 
than in England, the contrast being no doubt in 
some measure due to the aristocratic traditions 
which cling to the ancient seats of learning in 
that country. And, with exceptions here and 
there, the representatives of the classics have 
ignored, depreciated, or opposed the progress 
and extension of English study. The reason is 
plain: these classes of persons have been the 
representatives of prescription and authority, 

1 An interesting exception in this country was Brother 
Azarias (Patrick F. Mullany, 1847-] 



THE SENSATIONAL PHILOSOPHY 41 

and have therefore felt in the advance of English 
the approaching triumph of a natural foe. 

On the other hand, the allies of English have 
been democracy and individualism, the spirit 
of nationality, the methods of physical science, 
and the sensational and utilitarian philosophy, 
to which may be added the growing influence of 
woman, and, in part as the cause of this influence, 
the pervasive and vitalizing effect of essential 
Christianity. 

To illustrate these points briefly. Locke, the 
founder of modern sensational philosophy, thus 
writes in his Thoughts concerning Education 
(1693) : * Since 't is English that an English 
gentleman will have constant use of, that is the 
language he should chiefly cultivate, and wherein 
most care should be taken to polish and perfect 
his 'style. . . . Whatever foreign language a 
young man meddles with — and the more he 
knows, the better — that which he should criti- 
cally study, and labor to get a facility, clearness, 
and elegancy to express himself in, should be 
his own.' 

Franklin learned his English from the Spec- 
tatorj and he was the founder and most per- 
sistent supporter, in the face of much discour- 
agement, of an English high school in the city 
of Philadelphia. For this school he elaborated 
a plan of English teaching which can still be 



42 THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH 

pondered with profit by students of pedagogy. 
Jefferson, who espoused the cause of the people 
against the spirit of caste, established a chair 
of Anglo-Saxon in 1825 at his newly founded 
University of Virginia. 

The names of these three men — Locke, Frank- 
lin, and Jefferson — who, in the three successive 
centuries following the rediscovery of the ancient 
tongue, zealously advocated the study of English, 
are deeply significant. They were apostles of a 
sensational philosophy, of physical science in its 
application to homely uses, of toleration, of the 
rights and needs of the common man. They 
represented prose, common sense, materialism, 
so that it is by the exquisite irony of overruling 
circumstance that they have aided in bringing 
poetry, religion, and philosophical idealisms 
home to the smug and benighted Philistine. For 
our schools teach Ruskin rather than Locke, 
Shakespeare rather than Poor Richard's Alma- 
nac, Burke rather than Jefferson ; they speak, 
like Balaam, far other words than as they were 
commanded at the first. 

This ennoblement and etherealization of the 
subject of English teaching, and to some extent 
of its method, is primarily due to two causes — 
the influence of Christianity, and the consequent 
influence of woman. To begin with the larger 
of these two factors : the belief in the value of 



THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 43 

the individual is the basis of democracy, and 
this belief came into the world with Christianity. 
It was the Puritans who overthrew the despot- 
ism of the Stuarts, and it was their success 
that emboldened and informed the prophets of 
the French Revolution. Rousseau promulgated 
the gospel of individualism in a form adapted 
to his age and country, yet not more truly nor 
effectively than did Wesley in England; and 
Rousseau himself, however unwittingly or un- 
willingly, was but the mouthpiece of the Chris- 
tian consciousness which for centuries had been 
protesting against the vassalage of man to any 
power lower than the divine. The return to 
nature, the return to poetry, was a return to the 
indefeasible instincts and needs of the individual 
human soul. The social contract was supposed 
to rest upon free consent, like the association of 
individuals in the primitive Christian church. 

The lyric cry of Romanticism was an echo of 
the chants that resounded from the church and 
cloister of the Middle Ages. Like them, it was 
a passionate outpouring of the heart — in joy, in 
grief, in aspiration ; and, like them, it uttered 
itself in freer and more spontaneous forms than 
those inherited from classical antiquity. At that 
cry the doors of an almost forgotten sepulchre 
opened, and there stumbled forth into the light 
a figure wrapped in cerements, at whose appear- 



44 THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH 

ance some stood aghast, while others exulted 
with the pulse of a new life. As the grave-clothes 
have been slowly unwrapped, we have beheld a 
visage marred more than any man, and its form 
more than the sons of men ; but we have also 
seen a radiance streaming from the resuscitated 
members, and have felt a mysterious potency 
animating our own ; for we have assisted at the 
resurrection of the buried Christianity of the 
Middle Ages, with its likeness to the Crucified, 
with its yearnings over the poor and them that 
have no helper, with its eager pressing on to 
the realization of the kingdom of God. Thus it 
has come to pass that the great literature of the 
nineteenth century is either Christian or humani- 
tarian; and if humanitarian, then necessarily 
Christian, though it may be unconsciously or 
in its own despite. And what is true of the liter- 
ature is true also, in its degree, of the ideals of 
our English teaching. 

In this revolution woman has been at once 
a gainer and an actor. Whatever releases and 
strengthens the individual soul clothes her with 
might. Christianity, and the religion out of 
which Christianity sprang, first gave woman- 
hood, as distinguished from single notable wo- 
men, its potential dignity, influence, and fullest 
charm. What wonder that she has been instinc- 
tively repelled from those of the ancient classics, 



ENGLISH LITERATURE AND WOMAN 45 

and of their modern imitations, in which she 
has seen herself degraded and vilified? What 
wonder that she has been drawn toward a litera- 
ture of sympathy and palpitant emotion — a 
literature which places the virgin and the mother 
upon the throne of earth and heaven, while it 
makes of woman a ministrant in the abode of 
poverty and at the couch of feebleness and pain ? 
And so it results that much of the teaching of 
English is done by women, and it is they who 
strive forward, quite as eagerly as the men, to 
gain the advanced instruction in English of our 
higher institutions. 

The deeper causes of the increasing study of 
English are thus seen to lie in the onward sweep 
of certain irresistible forces which are not yet 
spent, and which are likely to continue in opera- 
tion for an indefinite period. The initial impulse 
came from that Protestantism which had been 
nourished in the lap of the Middle Ages ; then 
utilitarianism spoke its word, and advocated a 
study which came home to the business and 
bosoms of all men ; the spirit of nationality glo- 
rified the vernacular speech ; the spirit of indi- 
viduality emancipated men from bondage to 
pseudo-classicism; science inculcated fearless- 
ness in exploration, and a recognition of value 
only where, and in so far as, value really existed ; 
a reviving Christianity insisted on deference to 



46 , THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH 

its own literary as well as ethical precepts ; and 
at length woman had begun to assume the full 
royalty to which her claim had so long lain in 
abeyance, and to exercise it in behalf of those 
species and aspects of literature to which her 
nature inclines. 

We may now turn to consider the specific pro- 
gress effected in the last decade or so, though a 
fixed limit of time will not be easy to observe. 

In the course of rather more than a genera- 
tion in America, democracy has outgrown its in- 
stitutions of higher learning. Not in the sense 
that it has appropriated and utilized all that its 
colleges and academies had to offer, and that, 
having transcended all this learning and culture, 
it has mildly requested more. No, it is rather 
in the material sense that it has outgrown them : 
it has filled to repletion the dormitories, class- 
rooms, and laboratories, in at least one instance 
reciting in large tents pitched upon college 
grounds. The teeth of dragons had been scat- 
tered over a favorable soil, and immediately 
there sprang up impetuous hosts, rushing upon 
the domains of culture like the hordes of Attila 
upon the plains of fertile Italy. They were 
armed, so none could resist them; and they 
were rude, so that what they clamored for was 
less the garnered wisdom precious to the ripe 
scholar than such enginery of science as would 



SMATTERINGS OF CULTURE 47 

empower them to extort riches from the soil and 
the mine, or assist them in levying tribute upon 
the labor of others, together with such smatter- 
ing of letters as would enable them to communi- 
cate with precision and brevity their wishes and 
commands, or would embellish the rare social 
hour with some suggestions of artistic refine- 
ment. Training in the older sense they cared 
not for. Those who devoted themselves to phy- 
sical science endured so much of intellectual dis- 
cipline as they considered indispensable for the 
attainment of their ends, but were impatient of 
more. Those who were less serious or less spe- 
cific in their application were willing to practise 
the easier forms of writing, but in the pursuit 
of literature insisted upon being entertained, 
and then in being provided with abundance 
of the small coin of information and opinion, 
which they might utter in conversation or dis- 
pense in speech-making. If they were to have 
culture, it was culture made easy that they de- 
sired ; and, on the whole, they preferred to have 
it rather than otherwise. But to what purpose 
were they to turn their backs upon Greek and 
Latin, if they were to be required to pursue exact 
methods, and make solid acquisitions, in their 
native tongue ? 

Here was the opportunity, the problem, and 
the pitfall of English. There were all the stu- 



48 THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH 

dents that the most grasping partisan of the 
subject could ask for. How should they be em- 
ployed? How should they be satisfied? And 
how, if possible, should they be educated ? The 
first two of these questions were more readily 
answered than the third. 

The problem first beset the colleges, and espe- 
cially the larger of them. It was they that were 
the first to be overcrowded, because of their 
prestige. The academies and high schools had 
enough to do with the preparation of their stu- 
dents in the stock subjects required for admis- 
sion to college, in giving a little special attention 
to those who were to attend scientific schools, 
and in providing commercial courses ; their turn 
was to come later. In the colleges there con- 
tinued to be, as before, those who had inherited 
scholarly traditions, and who had come from re- 
fined homes — men who could be depended upon 
to profit by the best facilities provided for them. 
But side by side with these there were not only 
the children of poverty and obscurity — such 
there had always been, and from this class had 
arisen some of the most eminent of Americans 
— but a numerous body of students from fam- 
ilies wealthy without inherited ideals, or promi- 
nent without distinction. These persons were 
ready to allege their riches as a warrior might 
allege his. weapons ; it was a reason for doing 



EXPEDIENTS ADOPTED 49 

nothing contrary to their inclination, and espe- 
cially for nonchalant perseverance in the crudi- 
ties of Philistinism. 

Two possibilities presented themselves as 
contributory to the solution of the overwhelm- 
ing problem. Training implied small classes ; so 
training was not to be thought of. What, then, 
could be done with students in large masses ? 
They could have frequent practice in writing 
about subjects with which they were presumably 
already conversant; and they could listen to 
lectures on English literature. In the one way, 
they could, if not form a style, at least learn to 
avoid the most vulgar errors ; in the other, they 
could acquire a tincture of information concern- 
ing authors and their works, and learn to speak 
with decision about books which they perhaps 
had never read, and on which they had certainly 
never reflected. 

In the smaller colleges matters were not so 
bad, at least as respects the size of the classes. 
There was therefore an opportunity to do good 
teaching, and in many instances good teaching 
was done. But two forces militated against ex- 
cellence. The one was the influence of the larger 
colleges, exerted through their graduates and 
through public discussion ; and this, as we have 
seen, was unavoidably in the direction of super- 
ficiality. The other was the uncertainty respect- 



50 THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH 

ing the best methods of instruction, due in part 
to the recent enrolment of English among the 
favored topics of the curriculum, in part to the 
variety of related subjects which might be com- 
prehended under the term, and in part to the 
peculiar nature of English itself. To some it was 
clear that, since English was a language like 
Latin or Greek, with words and syntax, it could 
be taught like Latin or Greek, largely through 
etymological and grammatical exercitations or 
notes, with some assistance from the explana- 
tion of historical allusions and the citation of 
parallel passages. To others it was equally clear 
that, since English was our native tongue, it 
stood in no need of learned commeutary, and 
that nothing was necessary but to read it — read 
it rapidly, extensively, and with interest. Some, 
who had studied in Germany, were for carrying 
every word back to what they called Anglo- 
Saxon ; others had not so much as heard whether 
there were any Anglo-Saxon, but at all events 
were positive that it had no connection with 
modern English. Some loved poetry and aesthet- 
ics, and would none of Dryasdust ' philology ; ' 
others believed in applying the scientific method 
to literature, and eschewing impressionism and 
the musical glasses. All of us, I suppose, have 
done the best we knew how; it has not been 
our fault if we have insisted upon our personal 



VIEWS CONCERNING RHETORIC 51 

predilections, or taken up with other people's 
fads; the truth of it is that while Greek and 
Latin were taught according to a system and a 
method, good or bad, we had none upon which 
we were agreed, and, from the very nature of 
the case, could have none. 

Among the rhetorical teachers it was nearly or 
quite as bad as among the professors of literature. 
There were those who depended upon negative 
precepts — ' Don't ' writ large over many things 
reprehensible according to literary convention 
or the individual preceptor; those whose main 
reliance was upon constant practice in writing, 
with a minimum of precept ; those who followed 
the rhetoric of the eighteenth century, rewritten 
to date at the behest of enterprising publishers ; 
and those who believed that students would never 
mend till the English they spoke and wrote was 
regarded as the common concern of all depart- 
ments of instruction, and not relegated to one 
or a very few instructors, who in this way were 
made the scapegoats or whipping-boys not only 
for the sins of the whole student body, but also 
for the negligence of their other teachers. Here, 
again, we may not censure, and must certainly 
find much to admire. But if personal initiative 
is pardonable — nay, even praiseworthy — in 
those who have to sustain the first onset of an 
unexpected attack, and if we marvel at the pluck 



52 THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH 

with which one clubs his weapon and another 
flings a stone, it is not therefore to be doubted 
that the manual of arms is, on the whole, an ex- 
cellent book and worthy to be studied, nor that 
conduct and harmony of action are what an army 
chiefly needs. 

While the colleges were thus struggling with 
their difficulties, how was it faring with the 
schools ? In the lower schools training had been 
largely abandoned. ' Heading without tears ' 
was the watchword. The pupil must at all hazards 
be kept ' interested ' ; that is to say, amused and 
distracted. ' Language-lessons ' took the place 
of grammar, and the ' word-method ' of spelling. 
Spelling and grammar, therefore, became as obso- 
lete as the mediaeval trivium and quadrivium, 
and were reckoned among the lost arts. Instead 
of a few things well learned, there were many 
things badly taught. Now to know many things 
badly has from of old been regarded as a poor 
equipment for facing the stern * Stand and 
deliver ! ' of life. 

It was thus the high school and the academy 
that were to be caught between the upper and 
the nether millstone. For the colleges, finding 
an illiteracy confirmed by the habits of half a 
generation too deeply rooted to be eradicated 
within a reasonable time, at least with the means 
at their disposal, began to consider whether this 



ENTRANCE REQUIREMENTS 53 

inveteracy were not, on the whole, a thing to be 
deplored ; and eventually opined that it was. 
They then began to frame entrance requirements 
in English, designed to remove the more igno- 
minious phases of this illiteracy before college 
years, either through some acquaintance with 
English literature, or through practice in writing, 
or both. The requirements were of varying de- 
grees of severity ; but that mattered little, since 
they were seldom enforced, and never with the 
rigor which a decent regard to the opinions of 
enlightened humanity would have exacted. When 
the high schools were remonstrated with for the 
ignorance and slovenliness which they permitted, 
they alleged the prescriptive requirements of the 
colleges on the one hand, and on the other the 
inexorable demands of a public which expected 
them to teach bookkeeping, physics, chemistry, 
physiology, botany, geology, civics, political 
economy, manual training, domestic economy — 
all the * preparation for actual life.' How, then, 
could they take up English in addition ? * Eng- 
lish, forsooth ! — but yet if our pupils are minded 
to read certain books at home, and report the fact 
at school, we will see what can be done. Still, it 
is a crying injustice that we should be expected 
to retrieve all the deficiencies remaining through 
the negligence or incapacity of the lower schools.' 
The pressure thus exerted by the colleges 



54 THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH 

upon the preparatory schools has in many in- 
stances been transmitted by them to the gram- 
mar schools, with the result that the worst evils 
are in course of being remedied ; and certain 
high schools have courses in English extending 
over four years, and with four or five exercises 
a week, conducted by enthusiastic, winning, 
and competent teachers. Unfortunately, there 
is a premature movement on the part of a few 
high schools to emancipate themselves from all 
dependence upon college requirements — or, as 
their representatives would say, an unreasonable 
obstinacy on the part of the colleges in holding 
to their requirements — a movement which, 
unless carefully watched, will go far to nullify 
the progress which has been made, since it is 
only through the harmonious cooperation of all 
parts of our educational system that the indis- 
pensable results can be attained. 

Though there is still much to be desired, there 
is considerable ground for encouragement. A few 
of the gains of recent years may be briefly enu- 
merated. 

Through the agency of various bodies, chief 
of which is perhaps the Conference on Uniform 
Entrance Requirements in English, the chasm 
which yawned between the colleges and the pre- 
paratory schools is in process of being bridged 
over. This Conference, composed of representa- 



HARMONIZING AGENCIES 55 

tives from all sections of the country east of the 
Rocky Mountains — California has its own ex- 
cellent system of local cooperation — and from 
colleges and preparatory schools alike, has set 
up a standard not merely of college require- 
ments, but also of high school attainment, which 
is fairly satisfactory to the whole country; 
thus measurably harmonizing the views of both 
classes of institutions, as well as of the East, 
the West, and the South. But in this effort it 
has not stood alone. The National Educational 
Association and its committee of ten ; the Associ- 
ation of Colleges and Preparatory Schools of the 
Middle States and Maryland ; the Commission 
of Colleges in New England ; the New England 
Association of Colleges and Preparatory Schools ; 
the North Central Association of Teachers of 
English ; the Association of Colleges and Pre- 
paratory Schools of the Southern States ; the 
Regents of the State of New York; and the 
Schoolmasters' Association of New York City — 
these, and other similar bodies, besides numer- 
ous individuals whose names it would be invid-' 
ious to mention, have contributed to the same 
end. 

With a better understanding of what the 
secondary schools are expected to accomplish, 
there has come more pride in the work ; a spirit 
of emulation among the more aspiring of the 



56 THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH 

schools ; a growing sense of professionalism 
among the teachers of English ; and a demand 
for special instruction, suited to the needs of 
such teachers, on the part of the larger colleges 
and universities. In many cases, as already ob- 
served, excellent courses of instruction have been 
formulated within the individual school, or by 
bodies like the Connecticut Association of Clas- 
sical and High School Teachers ; and in some 
schools such programs are in successful opera- 
tion. Then, too, rival publishing houses, finding 
that it would be remunerative to focus their 
attention upon the books set for the entrance 
examinations, have competed with one another 
in the issue of well-edited and attractive texts. 
The interest in school-directed home reading is 
sure to follow ; canny publishers will reap a har- 
vest, and the public will be immensely benefited. 
With all allowance for deficiencies and blun- 
ders, then, we may fairly say that these results 
have been accomplished. The pride and interest 
of Americans in England's literature and that 
of our own country; the craving for culture in 
a form which promises so much return for so 
little expenditure of effort ; the admiration for 
our speech, because it is our own, because of 
its wide diffusion and sway, and because of the 
great works by which it has been illustrated ; and 
the need and desire to employ the language as a 



SLOW EMERGENCE FROM CHAOS 57 

means of communication, of persuasion, and of 
artistic achievement — these, seconded by the 
whole democratic and scientific trend of the cen- 
tury, by the interest of other races in their own 
vernaculars, and by the necessity of unifying our 
heterogeneous population on the basis of a com- 
mon speech and common sentiments, have not 
only multiplied magazines and newspapers, and 
cheapened books, but have introduced courses in 
English into schools and colleges of every grade, 
and taxed the energies and resources of every 
teacher of the subject. Beginning sporadically, 
and at first proceeding unevenly, the movement, 
as it has gathered volume, has tended to absorb 
the currents of individual opinion, and to render 
them all unconsciously tributary to a distant 
and perhaps as yet dimly perceived end. From 
the chaos and welter of divergent opinion, cer- 
tain conclusions have at least so far emerged 
that we can now fairly say what the country 
in general seeks as a requisite in English for 
admission to college. This requirement is help- 
ing to fix and direct the courses in English of 
the secondary schools ; and these, in turn, cannot 
fail to exercise a profound influence upon the 
ideals and efforts of the grammar and primary 
schools. In some degree, this establishment of 
a common standard of entrance proficiency in 
English tends to unify the college work, in so 



58 THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH 

far as it eliminates certain tasks from the college 
curriculum which have hitherto found a place 
there because it was necessary that they should 
be done somewhere. Further progress in the or- 
ganization of college teaching is to be expected 
through reflection upon the failures due to mis- 
directed endeavor ; through the natural efforts 
of rival institutions to equal or transcend one 
another's successes ; through the lessons taught 
by scientific pedagogy; and especially, it may 
be, from graduate study of the subject, leading 
to wider views and more philosophical generali- 
zations. 

It being assumed that important changes in 
the conception of English teaching are now in 
progress, and that we may confidently look for 
a more general agreement with respect to the 
precise nature of its purposes and processes, we 
may ask ourselves whether current practice and 
discussions will enable us to forecast what the 
next steps will be, and how far they will leave 
us short of a reasonable goal. In attempting 
to find an answer, we must bear in mind that 
if there are definable currents, there are also 
counter-currents ; and that what is true of one 
institution or one section of the country is not 
necessarily true, at the same moment, somewhere 
else. Were there not this confusion, and even 
apparent contrariety of effort, it would be far 



POSSIBILITIES YET UNREALIZED 59 

easier to outline the situation ; but this condition 
would imply that the gain had been achieved, 
and that henceforth we were to be content. Now 
it is the sense of unrealized possibilities, and of 
the field that they offer to hope and young am- 
bition, for which the teacher of English is most 
profoundly grateful, and which at times inspires 
him with the sentiments of a Columbus or a 
Magellan, if not of a Cortez or an Alexander. 

If we look at the situation largely, this, I think, 
may fairly be said at the moment : that the 
emphasis is upon quantity rather than quality, 
upon phenomena rather than principles, upon 
practice rather than theory, or upon the science 
rather than the philosophy of the subject. In 
this respect English does not stand absolutely 
alone, but the tendency is here more accentuated 
because English is such a late comer into the 
sisterhood of disciplines, and has yet so much to 
learn. Colleges pride themselves on the number 
of their English courses, their extent and their 
variety ; we have had the daily theme, perhaps 
with the addition of the weekly, the bi-weekly, 
or the monthly essay ; grammar has been exten- 
sively repudiated ; and the ' old rhetoric,' which 
I take to be a statement of principles with the 
necessary illustrations, has been supplanted by 
a newer rhetoric, which tends, at least in one 
of its phases, to become a collection of illustra- 



60 THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH 

tive excerpts from literature, with a minimum 
of elucidative theory. 

In some quarters, the spirit of science, cautious 
and inductive, is supplanting an older cocksure 
dogmatism. The processes of the investigator's 
laboratory are attempted in the class-room. The 
student is brought face to face with facts, and 
encouraged to draw his own inferences. He then 
becomes conscious of a world of phenomena 
which he cannot hope to master in a limited 
time, but which is infinitely attractive by reason 
of its complexity and vitality. Who would not 
hesitate to criticize a mode of teaching which 
is the scholar's mode of learning? The method 
of science, from the days of Bacon onward, has 
given man an ever increasing power over nature ; 
why should it not be applicable to language and 
literature, and if adopted in the study, why 
should it not be practicable in the school ? It 
is ; it must be. And yet we hesitate to stop with 
a simple assent. Science is content with advances 
which may be slow as the unspeeding precession 
of the equinoxes, if only they be sure ; while 
to the individual student, whether life be short 
or not, pupilage needs must be. Moreover, lit- 
erature belongs to the sphere of the emotions 
and the will, at least as much as to that of the 
pure intellect. And again, the novice may be in 
a position to draw proximate inferences, while 



THE PLACE OF PHILOSOPHY 61 

incapable of forming by himself those ultimate 
conceptions which are regulative of the whole na- 
ture, and which are as readily attained through 
the medium of literature as through any branch y 
of secular study. Besides, it is a fact that the 
student hungers for the voice of authority ; he 
can repose only in certitude — a certitude which 
he finds it impracticable to attain by his own ef- 
forts, yet without which he cannot act with the 
freedom and power which the possession of truth 
alone confers. In other words, the necessary 
complement of science is philosophy. Philosophy 
recognizes only a few great constitutive princi- 
ples, which it attains by including many phe- 
nomena under one law, and many subordinate 
laws under one more comprehensive. With a 
philosophy of literature one may approximately 
comprehend its great manifestations; with the 
science alone one has the pleasure of always 
learning, but the disadvantage of never being 
able to come to the knowledge of the truth. 

The still easier way — to pursue only infinite 
and uncoordinated, or at best loosely coordinated 
detail — is to sacrifice strength, grasp, direction, 
to the charm of waywardness, the delight of 
endless straying. Yet it must be confessed that 
to many minds the delight of endless straying 
is unconquerable. They love variety and easy 
appreciation ; they care not for a perception of 



62 THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH 

unity and law which must be bought with ardu- 
ous labor. The appeal of literature to them is, 
1 Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.' And are 
they to be blamed for yielding to the seductive 
proffer ? 

These considerations lead us to what is perhaps 
the fundamental problem in the teaching of Eng- 
lish literature — how to combine discipline with 
delight. Given a certain temperament in the 
speaker, and it is easy to interest or amuse classes 
or audiences with English literature. It is not 
so easy for persons of the like temperament, or 
of any temperament whatever, to train others, or 
themselves, by means of English literature. A 
certain training is always secured in the acqui- 
sition of a foreign or ancient language. This, 
it is sometimes said, must be missed by the 
student of his own : his memory and judgment 
are not exercised in the same way, and he is 
not called upon.to make the effort necessary for 
comprehending alien modes of thought. Must 
English literature, then, leave people where it 
finds them, save for the pleasure it affords, the 
fund of information it yields, and a certain 
vague and unconscious effect in the refinement 
of taste ? There are always those who will reply : 
' What more could you ask ? Is not this enough ? ' 
There are never lacking those who say : l English 
literature cannot be taught. The art of writing 



HOW THE GREEKS STUDIED HOMER 63 

cannot be taught. English literature can be 
read, and grammar can be taught. All subjects 
whatever can be talked about, facts can be mem- 
orized, examinations can be held, but literature 
and the art of writing cannot be taught.' 

Perhaps the dispute is one about words. Sup- 
pose we change the terms, and ask, not whether 
literature can be taught, but whether people can 
be taught by means of literature. Antiquity evi- 
dently thought so. Let us hear the testimony of 
Professor Jebb: 1 'The study of the poets in 
schools is described in Plato's Protagoras, . . . 
The purpose was not only to form the boy's liter- 
ary taste, or to give him the traditional lore ; it 
was especially a moral purpose, having regard 
to the precepts in the poets, and to the praises 
of great men of old — " in order that the boy 
may emulate their examples, and may strive to 
become such as tbey." From this point of view, 
Homer was regarded as the best and greatest 
of educators. In Xenophon's Symposium one of 
the guests says : " My father, anxious that I 
should become a good man, made me learn all 
the poems of Homer ; and now I could say the 
whole Iliad and Odyssey by heart." . . . Espe- 
cially, as Isocrates says, Homer was looked upon 
as the embodiment of national Hellenic senti- 
ment. No one else was so well fitted to keep the 

1 Homer, p. 81. 



64 THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH 

edge of Hellenic feeling keen and bright against 
the barbarian.' 

This is instructive in more than one way. Note 
(1) that it is poetry that is studied; (2) that the 
study is intimate and prolonged ; (3) that it does 
not range over a boundless field ; (4) that it has 
a direct and practical bearing upon life ; (5) that 
it is a study of character and sentiments, not 
primarily of words and technique. And not other- 
wise is Horace's conception of the usefulness of 
Homer in the Second Epistle of the First Book, 
or Plutarch's in his treatise on How a Young 
Man should study Literature. 1 

Turning from antiquity to modern times, we 
may ask ourselves what Milton — one of the 
wisest men who have ever written on the training 
of youth — thought about education as sought 
through the recorded speech of the past. Remem- 
ber that he wrote a Latin grammar, and made 
extensive collections for a Latin dictionary, and 
then listen to his assertion in the treatise On 
Education : ' Though a linguist should pride him- 
self to have all the tongues that Babel cleft the 
world into, yet if he have not studied the solid 
things in them, as well as the words and lexi- 
cons, he were nothing so much to be esteemed a 
learned man as any yeoman or tradesman com- 

1 See, for example, Padelf ord's translation ( Yale Studies in 
English XV), pp. 61 ff. 



MILTON'S THEORY OF TEACHING 65 

petently wise in his mother dialect only.' On 
the premature practice of composition he has 
to observe : ■ And that which casts our profi- 
ciency therein so much behind ' — he is speaking 
of Latin and Greek, but he would have held 
the same respecting English — 4 is our time lost, 
. . . partly in a preposterous exaction, forcing 
the empty wits of children to compose themes, 
verses, and orations, which are the acts of ripest 
judgment, and the final work of a head filled by 
long reading and observing with elegant maxims 
and copious invention. These are not matters to 
be wrung from poor striplings, like blood out of 
the nose, or the plucking of untimely fruit.' 

Leaving the criticism of existing practices, 
Milton next proceeds to develop his own plan. 
He resumes : ' For their studies, first they should 
begin with the chief and necessary rules of some 
good grammar ; . . . and while this is doing, their 
speech is to be fashioned to a distinct and clear 
pronunciation, as near as may be to the Italian, 
especially in the vowels.' When it comes to their 
reading, he is of opinion that ' the main skill and 
groundwork will be to temper them such lec- 
tures and explanations, upon every opportunity, 
as may lead and draw them in willing obedience, 
inflamed with the study of learning and the ad- 
miration of virtue, stirred up with high hopes of 
living to be brave men and worthy patriots, dear 



66 THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH 

to God and famous to all ages.' After much time 
spent upon the useful arts and the best authors, 
he would introduce his pupils to logic and the 
theory of poetry. ' This,' he says, ' would make 
them soon perceive . . . what religious, what 
glorious and magnificent use might be made of 
poetry, both in divine and human things.' And 
here comes the conclusion of the whole matter, 
so far as the practice of writing is concerned : 
1 From hence, and not till now, will be the right 
season of forming them to be able writers and 
composers in every excellent matter, when they 
shall be thus fraught with an universal insight 
into things.' 

Such was not only Milton's theory, but such 
had already been his practice. As is well known, 
he spent five years at Horton, after leaving the 
university, in the perusal of the classics. And 
what was the effect of this reading upon Milton 
as man and as poet ? I will take the answer from 
a contemporary Miltonic scholar : x ' To Milton 
an extension of his reading was an extension of 
his own life, with all its experience, sympathies, 
and understanding, into the life and times of 
which he read. ... It is a commonplace that 
travel enlarges a man's nature. For the high and 
sensitive mind books do the same, and in the case 

1 Osgood, The Classical Mythology of Milton's English Poems, 
p. xliii, 



HOW AUTHORS LEARN LITERATURE 67 

of Milton the quality of wide range in his poetic 
utterance was a direct consequence of the range 
of his own mind, which his reading had done 
much to extend.' In another place the same 
writer says : ! ' In attempting to explain Milton's 
power over his material, one word suggests itself. 
... It is his clearness of vision. With the de- 
tailed scrutiny of the Renaissance added to the ex- 
alted faith of the Middle Ages and the clearness 
and intellectuality of true classicism, he looked 
upon the world with a more perfect comprehen- 
sion of its meaning and of the right purpose in 
life. Throughout his poems there is passionate 
but steady contemplation of things which men of 
his time either failed to see, or saw but faintly 
and apart from life itself. They are the eternal 
truths which lie around and above this life, and 
through which all things act in cooperation, and 
not in contradiction, as it appears to the worldly 
man.' 

Here, then, we come back to our theme. 
Whether or not literature can be taught, at 
least the lesson of it can be learned. It was 
learned by Dante, sitting at the feet of Virgil, 
and Aristotle, and the authors of Scripture ; 
by Chaucer, sitting at the feet of Ovid, and 
Petrarch, and Guillaume de Lorris ; by Spen- 
ser, sitting at the feet of Chaucer and Tasso ; by 

1 Op. cit., p. lxviii. 



68 THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH 

Burke, sitting at the feet of Cicero and Milton ; 
by Tennyson, sitting at the feet of Homer, and 
Virgil, and Dante, and Keats, and Wordsworth. 
The great learners always learn meanings and 
values. Incidentally, they may learn facts and 
phrases and artifices ; they may learn to imitate ; 
they may learn to appropriate ; they may even 
learn to surpass; but the supreme thing they 
learn is meanings and values — the meanings 
of life, the relative values of the various pos- 
sibilities that life offers. These things litera- 
ture can teach us, if we will learn ; and these 
things it is important that we, and our children, 
should know. The great authors must know 
them ; not alone the authors of permanent lit- 
erature, but the authors of permanent freedom, 
permanent empire, permanent civilization. Au- 
thors, and all artists, are shapers ; and in Amer- 
ica every one is called upon to be a shaper — to 
shape his own destiny, the destiny of his country, 
the destiny, in some sense, of the world. If he 
does not know the meanings and values of things, 
what shapes will he produce? And in all our 
education, what shall teach him these meanings 
and values, if not literature ? 

It has been pertinently asked : ' Why has all 
this teaching of English, in the last twenty 
years, produced so little good literature ? What 
is there to show for all the effort, for all the hue 



WHAT ARE THE FRUITS? 69 

and cry ? Men like Lowell, bred up in the ancient 
classics, and advocating them to the end, are 
among the foremost in American letters. Their 
successors, fed, without labor of their own, on 
the accumulated stores of England and America 
— where are they? who are they? what have 
they produced ? ' Well, perhaps the fault is not 
alone in the teaching of English. The matter 
is by no means so simple as that. But certainly 
the supreme justification for devoting so much 
space to the subject of English would be found 
in the production of authors, the production of 
men, the production of statesmen and patriots, 
who should equal — no, that would not be suffi- 
cient ; who should surpass — the authors, the 
men, the statesmen, and the patriots reared under 
the tutelage of the ancient classics and the Bible. 
We have all the advantage, for we have the an- 
cient classics and the Bible too, in addition to 
the treasures of our own literature. The English 
teacher may teach Plato and Dante, Goethe and 
Moliere, if he so choose, as well as Shakespeare 
and Browning. Nay, if he is to teach meanings 
and values, he must teach them, at least by im- 
plication ; for his own sense of meanings and 
values will be most imperfect if he do not him- 
self know the best literature of all the world, 
and constantly use it as the touchstone by which 
to try the authors with whom he is dealing. 



70 THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH 

Fortunately, there are signs which point that 
safe and happy way. The validity of rhetori- 
cal practice and precept is being tested by 
an examination of the underlying psychology. 
Here and there classes in poetical theory are 
endeavoring to ascertain what qualities insure 
the permanence and enduring charm of litera- 
ture. Scholarship in English, through the agency 
of our better graduate schools, is deepening as 
well as widening, is growing more refined and 
less mechanical. There is hope that the quanti- 
tative test will be gradually supplanted by the 
qualitative — that we shall forget to ask, ' How 
much ? ' and begin to ask, ' How well ? ' But to 
attain this result implies something more than 
harmonious effort from the primary school to 
the university; it implies that in every grade 
the attention shall be steadfastly fixed, not upon 
the demands of the next higher grade, but 
upon the best things — the things eternally best 
in their own nature, the things which most surely 
conduce to the fullness and perfection of indi- 
vidual and national life. 



Ill 

THE RELATION OF WORDS TO 
LITERATURE 



THE RELATION OF WORDS TO 
LITERATURE 1 

. . . We are told of Cuvier that, from a single 
bone of a fossil animal, he could, whether or not 
he had studied its anatomy previously, construct 
its entire skeleton. Have we not profound respect 
for the Greek archaeologist who can, from a few 
broken capitals and ruined bases, reconstruct a 
beautiful temple ? Do we not admire the sure- 
ness of knowledge which enables one to eke out 
the missing parts of an ancient statue ? What 
skill is frequently displayed by palaeographers 
in supplying letters, whole words, and sometimes 
even several words of a mutilated inscription ! 
In a note to Matthew Arnold's essay on Celtic 
literature, Lord Strangford shows how, by simi- 
lar study, the forms of a prehistoric language 
can be ascertained with certainty. He says : * By 
true inductive research, based on an accurate 
comparison of such forms of Celtic speech, oral 
and recorded, as we now possess, modern phi- 
lology has, in so far as was possible, succeeded in 

1 From an address delivered at Vassar College, February 
19, 1906. 



74 RELATION OF WORDS TO LITERATURE 

restoring certain forms of the parent speech, 
and in so doing has achieved not the least strik- 
ing of its many triumphs ; for these very forms, 
thus restored, have since been verified past all 
cavil by their actual discovery in the old Gaulish 
inscriptions recently come to light.' 

Where the laws of nature have been in opera- 
tion, as in the case of the bony structure of an 
animal, and to some extent in the form of a 
language, such reconstructions, though always 
admirable, are perhaps not precisely wonderful. 
Where human choice or will enters, as in the 
productions of architecture and sculpture, or in 
lapidary inscriptions, it might be supposed that 
they would introduce an element of caprice, and 
therefore of uncertainty ; yet we know how fre- 
quently, and with how much sureness, the missing 
parts are divined. This must be, then, because 
such works of art, too, have a certain organic 
character, because they cohere almost as do the 
members of an animal. A squirrel with horns, 
or a sheep with a trunk like an elephant — who 
would think of postulating such monstrosities? 
Now this sense of the monstrous, and hence of 
the impossible, must grow, and become more and 
more keen, in every capable person who devotes 
himself to intensive study in any department. 
Such a one will not look for the chiaroscuro 
of Rembrandt in a fresco by Giotto, nor for the 



DIVINATION DUE TO HARD WORK 75 

dreamy languors of a modern waltz in a fugue 
or chorale by Bach. 

In the field of literary investigation, reputa- 
tions are now and again won, almost over night, 
by the application of such principles. Some 
thirty years ago, a student of the Germanic 
languages, reading over an Old English poem 
of considerable length, called the Genesis, was 
struck by the fact that five or six hundred lines, 
in the heart of the poem, seemed to differ in 
various respects from the lines which preceded 
and followed. Pursuing his inquiry further, and 
comparing the forms of these lines with those 
of a kindred language, he came to the conclu- 
sion that this section, which had always been 
supposed to be original Old English, had been 
in fact translated from Old Saxon, the conti- 
nental Germanic tongue referred to above, and 
was therefore led to believe in the existence of 
an Old Saxon poem on this subject of Genesis, 
though he was obliged to confess that he had 
found no other trace of its existence. Some 
twenty years after, another scholar, at work in 
the Vatican Library, which had only recently 
rendered its treasures more accessible, discovered 
a fragment of the missing Old Saxon Genesis, 
of which probably no one had read a line for a 
thousand years. Yet such had been the faith of 
competent scholars in Sievers' processes that no 



76 RELATION OF WORDS TO LITERATURE 

one was surprised when the missing manuscript 
swam into sight, any more than astronomers 
were amazed when the telescope pointed to the 
quarter of the heavens indicated by Adams and 
Leverrier, and revealed the planet Neptune, 
which no human eye till then had ever seen. 
Professor Sievers might have read histories of 
Old English literature, and essays on it, for 
decades; he might have read this poem in a 
casual way a score of times, just as Adams and 
Leverrier might have rushed about the sky with 
their telescopes for unnumbered nights, without 
anything to reward their diligence ; but by the 
intensive methods they actually employed, Sie- 
vers became famous at twenty-five, and Adams 
immortalized himself at twenty-seven. 

A little reflection will show that intensive 
study is compatible with extensive, and, in fact, 
is impossible without it. Adams and Leverrier 
could not hope to discover Neptune save through 
an acquaintance with the whole planetary system. 
If Sievers had known no other language than 
Old English, it would have been to compara- 
tively little purpose that he studied the Gene- 
sis, The person who investigates Milton line by 
line, and word by word, must know more than 
a little of the ancient poets, of Spenser and of 
Shakespeare, if his intensive study is to yield 
him the richest returns. 



AN ILLUSTRATION FROM ARCHAEOLOGY 77 

Nothing will sooner convince one of the neces- 
sity for wide knowledge of his chosen subject 
than an attempt to master some small corner of 
it. Not long ago an archaeologist was studying 
the representations of the god Pan in sculp- 
ture and the allied arts. Side by side with the 
numerous figures of a bearded and goat-footed 
deity, with prominent horns, he came upon some 
of quite a different type, in which the god was 
represented as a beardless youth, with merely 
incipient horns half-hidden by his clustering 
hair, and with no other sign of animality about 
him. How was this to be explained ? Had our 
intensive student been narrow in his outlook and 
knowledge, he must have rested in a statement 
of this discrepancy. Being such as he was, how- 
ever, he had no difficulty in showing that the 
youthful type was merely a slight modification 
of a famous statue by the sculptor Polycletus, 
called the Doryphoros, or spear-bearer. Provided 
with inconspicuous horns, and with a sheep-hook 
instead of a spear, this figure was readily trans- 
formed into a statue highly acceptable to those 
worshipers of Pan who demanded more beauty or 
dignity in the semblance of their deity than fig- 
ures of the usual type possessed. Whenever a new 
statue, or fragment of a statue, is discovered in 
Greece, professional students are at once ready to 
draw upon all extant knowledge of the subject 



78 RELATION OF WORDS TO LITERATURE 

in order to identify the personage depicted, and 
to assign the marble or bronze to its epoch, its 
school, or its individual creator. 

Let me now attempt to illustrate the intensive 
study of literature by an example taken from 
so well-known a poet as Tennyson. The poem I 
have selected is already comparatively short, but 
I shall still further limit myself, and examine 
only a small portion of it ; and even this I shall 
not attempt to study as minutely as might be 
necessary if one were intent on making discov- 
eries concerning a poem whose relations were 
otherwise unknown. As I shall need, however, 
to touch upon what Matthew Arnold has called 
natural magic, and the peculiar susceptibility to 
it shown by the Celtic genius, I must first direct 
your attention to one or two sentences from the 
essay on Celtic literature in which he deals with 
that phase of the subject. Speaking of the Celt, 
he says (p. 82) : ' His sensibility gives him a 
peculiarly near and intimate feeling of nature 
and the life of nature ; here, too, he seems in a 
special way attracted by the secret before him, 
the secret of natural beauty and natural magic, 
and to be close to it, to half-divine it.' He 
finds the Celtic quality in Reynolds and Tur- 
ner as painters (p. 93). * They succeed,' says he, 
'in magic, in beauty, in grace, in expressing 
almost the inexpressible. Here is the charm of 



TENNYSON'S MERLIN AND THE GLEAM 79 

Keynolds' children and Turner's seas ; the im- 
pulse to express the inexpressible carries Turner 
so far that at last it carries him away.' 

Turning to the poem we have selected, Tenny- 
son's Merlin and The Gleam, we find that it was 
written in his late maturity, three years before 
his death, and when he was eighty years old. 
He had long been familiar with the Celtic le- 
gends concerning Arthur, and the Idylls of the 
King are touched with not a little of Celtic im- 
aginativeness. In Hallam Tennyson's Memoir 
his father is made to say : ' In the story of Mer- 
lin and Nimue I have read that Nimue means the 
Gleam — which signifies in my poem the higher 
poetic imagination.' With the very title of the 
poem thus coming from a Celtic source, it would 
not be surprising if the poem itself were suffused 
with Celtic magic. If Tennyson were to suffuse 
it with magic, and especially with Celtic magic, 
what words would he be likely to make use of to 
effect his purpose ? Evidently he would not use 
any chance words that he might happen to re- 
call, but would make a definite selection of such 
as would be full of the requisite connotations. 

Now let us see what he has done. The poem 
contains nine stanzas. Every stanza ends with 
the words, 4 The Gleam ; ' that is to say, the 
theme — the higher poetic imagination in its re- 
lation to the poet — recurs in the manner of a 



80 RELATION OF WORDS TO LITERATURE 

refrain. It is a light — a fugitive, a traveling, 
an advancing light — which the poet is to fol- 
low throughout his poem, as throughout his life. 
By this means he will obtain movement — move- 
ment which he will express by numerous verbs 
— movement, and occasional rest, and movement 
again, movement prolonged, as it were, beyond 
the end of his poem, and even of his life. Move- 
ment, and a light — a light appearing not only 
for itself, but also for the illumination which it 
may shed upon objects exposed to it. The move- 
ment gives unity to the poem: we follow the 
gleam in its wanderings until it disappears be- 
yond the poem's verge, and then the poem ceases. 
/ Now what sort of word is needed to denote 
this light ? Shall it be ' ray ' — or ' beam ' — or 
' glow ' — or ' glint ' — or ' spark ' — or ' flash ' — 
or ' blaze ' — or ' flame ' — or' sheen ' — or ' splen- 
dor ' ? We might discuss each of these, and 
find reasons for rejecting them all. Some of the 
reasons for selecting ' gleam ' may be discovered 
in Tennyson's own use of the word as noun and 
verb. ' Gleam,' with him, may suggest cold light 
or warm light. Perhaps it is rather cold than 
warm in The Miller's Daughter (115, 116) : 
The white chalk-quarry from the hill 
Gleamed to the flying moon by fits. 

Here we are made to associate the word with 
alternate appearance and disappearance. 



THE CHOICE OF A WORD 81 

We cannot doubt which is meant in the line 
from The Two Voices (182) : 

Beyond the polar gleam forlorn. 
In Merlin and Vivien (223) : 

Like sallows in the windy gleams of March. 
In Loclcsley Hall (4) we have something forbid- 
ding: 

Dreary gleams about the moorland flying over Locksley 
Hall. 

On the other hand, in addressing Margaret, the 

poet says : 

Lulled echoes of laborious day 
Come to you, gleams of mellow light 
Float by you on the verge of night. 

But the quality which we should chiefly expect 
to find in the poem before us occurs in a much 
earlier poem, The Two Voices (380) : 

Moreover, something is or seems 
t That touches me with mystic gleams, 

Like glimpses of forgotten dreams. 

The thought of our poem, as well as this word, 
Tennyson might have derived from Words- 
worth's lines on . Peele Castle — the familiar 

lines : 

— And add the gleam, 
The light that never was on sea or land, 
The consecration, and the poet's dream. 

As early as the Elizabethan period the word 
was dowered with mystical associations, or at 



82 RELATION OF WORDS TO LITERATURE 

least associations of high poetical beauty, such 
as Matthew Arnold might call Celtic. The 
seventeenth century had but just begun when 
Marston wrote (Antonio and Mellida, Act 3) : 

Is not yon gleam the shuddering morn that flakes 
With silver tincture the east verge of heaven ? 

Thus we see that Tennyson had already in- 
vested the word with the necessary atmosphere 
in the earlier part of his life, that he had possibly 
taken it over from Wordsworth in just the sense 
needed here, and that its poetic possibilities had 
been discovered when Shakespeare was in mid 
career. Could one ask a more appropriate history 
in the case of a word which was to dominate 
such a poem? Perhaps not; but we have not 
yet exhausted its appropriateness. The English 
language does not yield up its riches so easily ; 
we must dig for them, as for hid treasures. 1 

If we revert to the oldest period of English, 
we shall find, in the first place, that 'gleam' 
has always been a poetic word. In Old English 
poetry it is used some five times — once as a 

1 Joubert says : ' Like the fields, languages are enriched 
by digging ; to make them fruitful, when they are no longer 
virgin soil, we must dig deep.' And again : ' In literature it 
is well for the writer to go back to the sources of a language, 
because he thus opposes antiquity to fashion; and besides, 
when a man discovers in his native tongue that touch of unfa- 
miliarity which stimulates and awakens the taste, he speaks it 
better, and with more pleasure.' 



EARLY MEANING OF 'GLEAM' 83 

synonym for the sun, once of the brightness of the 
sun as it causes vegetation to revive in spring, 
once of the glorious beauty of the earth, once 
of a heavenly light appearing in the darkness of 
night, and once of the radiance of beautiful maid- 
enhood. 1 Notwithstanding the effulgence which 
it originally denoted, the word is somewhat re- 
motely akin to glimmer and glimpse. We now 
begin to see why it is so marvelously adapted to 
our poem. When the lexicographer defines the 
word, he does so in the following terms: 4 In 
early use, a brilliant light (e. g. of the sun). In 
mod. use, a subdued or transient appearance of 
light, emitted or reflected.' The poet, then, has 
warrant in the history of the word for increas- 
ing or diminishing the light it designates. In 
this respect its meaning has not been fixed, 
any more than in the steadiness of the shining. 
Tennyson's 

Dreary gleams about the moorland flying over Locksley 
Hall 

1 It is of course not necessary to assume that Tennyson 
was familiar with the earliest history of the word ; it is suffi- 
cient to realize that it had come down to him from a remote 
antiquity invested with poetic associations, some constant, and 
some gradually acquired, of which he could avail himself on 
occasion. The picture mellowed hy centuries has richer and 
deeper tones than the same picture when it left the painter's 
hand ; hut the later effects repose upon the earlier, and are 
evolved out of them. 



84 RELATION OF WORDS TO LITERATURE 

suggests fitfulness or intermittence. But when, 
in The Two Voices (212), the poet speaks of those 
who 

Saw distant gates of Eden gleam, 

the light implied is not necessarily unsteady, nor 
does it seem to me to be so in Wordsworth's 

— gleam, 
The light that never was on sea or land. 

Suppose we compare it in these respects with 
glow, as in Milton's 

— Now glowed the firmament 
With living sapphires, 

or in Tennyson's reference to the planet Mars 
{Maud 3. 6. 14) : 

As he glowed like a ruddy shield on the Lion's breast. 

Is glow capable of such range — intensity and 
fitfulness both considered? Or, not to neglect 
other words beginning with gl, let us take glance, 
as in The Brook : 

I slip, I slide, I gloom, I glance. 

Is its range any wider? Or that of glitter, 
or glimpse, or glimmer ? Glitter, like glimmer, 
belongs to those frequentative formations in 
-er which, by the very law of their constitution, 
originally denote or imply unsteadiness. Kingsley 
has {Misc. 2. 17) : ' As their wings glittered in 
the light, they looked like flakes of snow.' Ten- 



'GLEAM' AND 'GLIMMER 1 85 

nyson thus uses glimmer of a reflection (JEdwin 
Morris 135) : 

Her taper glimmered in the lake below. 

And it hardly needs saying that glimpse im- 
plies a similar unsteadiness, or rather fitfulness, 
as with reference to the ghost of Hamlet's father, 
who 

Revisits thus the glimpses of the moon. 

And now, if we return to our poem, we shall 
see how Tennyson can use the kinship of two 
words, the range of meaning in the one, and the 
comparative fixity of the other, in stanza 6 : 

For out of the darkness 

Silent and slowly 

The Gleam, that had waned to a wintry glimmer 

On icy fallow 

And faded forest, 

Drew to the valley 

Named of the shadow, 

And slowly brightening 

Out of the glimmer, 

And slowly moving again to a melody 

Yearningly tender, 

Fell on the shadow, 

No longer a shadow, 

But clothed with The Gleam. 

If we reflect that this is the darkest and most 
horrible of all shadows, the shadow of death, we 
shall feel the expansiveness, the latent potencies 



86 RELATION OF WORDS TO LITERATURE 

of this Gleam, which erstwhile ' had waned to a 
wintry glimmer,' and shall find ourselves back 
again with the solar effulgence recognized in Old 
English, the * splendor in the grass,' the ' glory- 
in the flower,' that victorious principle of life 
and beauty which triumphs over ugliness and 
triumphs over death. 

A while ago I was speaking of the Celtic tone 
of this poem. I might have spoken of a cer- 
tain wistfulness and unrest, a dissatisfaction with 
the actual, an unworldliness, almost an unearth- 
liness, in it. I might have found in it sugges- 
tions of that Celtic land of Brittany on which 
a French lecturer has been so eloquently dis- 
coursing in this country of late, or of that Celtic 
land of Lyonnesse by the Cornish sea, where, 
as the novice informs Guinevere, her father, as 
he rode, 

— An hour or maybe twain 
After the sunset, down the coast, he heard 
Strange music, and he paused, and turning — there, 
All down the lonely coast of Lyonnesse, 
Each with a beacon-star upon his head, 
And with a wild sea-light about his feet, 
He saw them — headland after headland flame 
Far on into the rich heart of the west ; 
And in the light the white mermaiden swam, 
And strong man-breasted things stood from the sea, 
And sent a deep sea- voice thro' all the land, 
To which the little elves of chasm and cleft 
Made answer, sounding like a distant horn. 



WORDS CONVEY ALIEN SENTIMENT 87 

And yet, though I have insisted on the Celti- 
cism present, and perhaps dominant, in the 
poem, it will not have escaped your notice that 
I have been dwelling at considerable length on a 
word — the word gleam — which is not Celtic 
at all, but Germanic, a word as Anglo-Saxon as 
Anglo-Saxon can be. What is to be said under 
these circumstances ? Am I not convicted of a 
glaring non sequitur f Yes, unless the non se- 
quitur be Tennyson's. The truth is, for one thing, 
that the number of demonstrably Celtic words in 
English is very small, so that the poet could not 
convey Celtic feeling by this agency, if he would. 
And then has not the example of * gleam ' shown 
us that a word belonging to a race alien and 
hateful to the Celt, a race which seemed to him 
uncouth, barbarous, even stupid, may yet serve 
admirably to convey Celtic sentiment ? 

This principle may be illustrated from the whole 
poem. In the first stanza, of ten lines and thirty- 
five words (including repetitions), there are two 
Latin words, both in the first line, one from Old 
Norse, die, one from Old Persian, magician, and 
all the rest pure English, or Anglo-Saxon. The 
Old Persian word, if it be really such, is one of 
might and mystery. An ancient writer says : * 
• Among the Persians they who are wise respect- 
ing the deity, and are his servants, are called 

1 Porphyry, Be Abstin. 4. 16. 



88 RELATION OF WORDS TO LITERATURE 

magi.' There is considerable evidence to show 
that both name and office of these magi were 
originally Babylonian. Now what was magic, 
among what nations was it practised, what was 
it supposed to accomplish, what rites did it em- 
ploy ? Was there any truth in it ? How long did 
it persist ? When did it die out ? These questions 
may suggest how little we know about the word 
without deeper study. What should we think 
about the Magi who came to worship Christ? 
Where did they come from, and why did they 
come ? Were their pursuits such as should de- 
serve our respect? In Tennyson's Corning of 
Arthur, we may remember in passing, Merlin 
is called a mage (279-281) : 

And there I saw mage Merlin, whose vast wit 
And hundred winters are but as the hands 
Of loyal vassals toiling for their liege. 

Excluding the four words I have specified — 
O and mariner Latin, die Old Norse, and magi- 
cian Old Persian or Babylonian through Greek 
— the others of the first stanza are all Anglo- 
Saxon, as I have said. Does not this suggest 
that there are unsuspected possibilities in com- 
mon words ? We look at the familiar words of 
the first stanza, such as haven, gray, eyes, wonder, 
follow, and we say, ■ Oh, yes, we know them.' 
Yes, but do we know them? If so, why cannot we 
do with them what Tennyson could ? May it not 



ONE WAY TO STUDY WORDS 89 

perhaps be that he saw deeper into them than 
we do? We are told of Lord Chatham, certainly 
one of the very greatest of English orators, that, 
in addition to much practice in translating from 
Demosthenes, and learning by heart many of the 
sermons of Barrow, c he went twice through the 
folio dictionary of Bailey (the best before that 
of Johnson), examining each word attentively, 
dwelling on its peculiar import and modes of 
construction, and thus endeavoring to bring 
the whole range of our language completely 
under his control.' ! Why should he not have 
confined himself, it might be thought, to the 
uncommon and difficult words? Why examine 
each word attentively, and dwell not only on its 
peculiar import, but also on its modes of construc- 
tion? Cannot a person of literary ambition, 
desirous to be a commanding orator or laureate 
poet, do better than that ? Apparently not ; or 
at least there seems to be an advantage in his 
doing that, whatever better things he may do. 

' But,' you say, ' it is not the words, but 
the way they are put together.' Just so ; Lord 
Chatham had apparently thought of this, too. 
Or you say, ' It is not the words, but the music 
of the verse.' Let us see. The verse of Merlin 
and The Gleam follows the same pattern as that 
of the dozen years earlier Battle of Brunanburh, 

1 Goodrich, Select British Eloquence, p. 52. 



90 RELATION OF WORDS TO LITERATURE 

which Tennyson is supposed to have constructed 
on an Old English model. Listen to the first 
stanza of that poem: — 

Athelstan King, 
Lord among Earls, 
Bracelet-bestower and 
Baron of Barons, 
He with his brother, 
Edmund Atheling, 
Gaining a lifelong 
Glory in battle, 
Slew with the sword-edge 
There by Brunanburh, 
Brake the shield-wall, 
Hewed the linden-wood, 
Hacked the battle-shield, 
Sons of Edward with hammered brands. 

Does that seem to you the magical and mystical 
melody of the later poem ? Or does this? 

Slender reason had 

He to be glad of 

The clash of the war-glaive — 

Traitor and trickster 

And spurner of treaties — 

He, nor had Anlaf 

With armies so broken 

A reason for bragging 

That they had the better 

In perils of battle 

On places of slaughter — 

The struggle of standards, 

The rush of the javelins, 



THE BRUNANBURH AND THE MERLIN 91 



The crash of the charges, 
The wielding of weapons — 
The play that they played with 
The children of Edward. 

And now a stanza of the Merlin : 

Then to the melody, 
Over a wilderness 
Gliding, and glancing at 
Elf of the woodland, 
Gnome of the cavern, 
Griffin and Giant, 
And dancing of Fairies 
In desolate hollows, 
And wraiths of the mountain, 
And rolling of dragons 
By warble of water, 
Or cataract music 
Of falling torrents, 
Flitted The Gleam.' 

Compare individual lines from the two poems : 

Brake the shield-wall 
with 



or 



with 



or 



with 



Elf of the woodland ; 
Hacked the battle-shield 
Gnome of the cavern ; 
The crash of the charges 
By warble of water. 



92 RELATION OF WORDS TO LITERATURE 

Is it not evident that there is a difference, a 
difference which becomes cumulative and em- 
phatic in the sweep of a stanza, or the totality 
of a poem ? And are not these cumulative effects 
built up out of elements — of individual lines, 
if you will, but, in the last analysis, out of ele- 
ments smaller than individual lines, namely, out 
of individual words ? 

Now here belongs a truth which is frequently 
overlooked. It is this: One does not truly 
and completely know a word, as Lord Chatham 
and Tennyson knew words, save through con- 
trast and comparison. In a sense, one knows 
nothing save by contrast and comparison. Cold, 
they tell us, is absence of heat. It follows that 
he who does not know heat does not know cold, 
or at least is not in a position to appreciate 
degrees of cold. So, if we recur to the Anglo- 
Saxon words of the first stanza, we may say 
that he does not know haven, as Lord Chatham 
and Tennyson knew haven, who does not also 
know harbor and port. Now in the first three 
lines of the Merlin let us substitute harbor for 
haven, making also two other substitutions, and 
instead of 

O young Mariner, 

You from the haven 

Under the sea-cliff,' 

we shall have : 



ATTEMPTED SUBSTITUTIONS 93 

O young Sea-dog, 
You from the harbor 
Under the promontory. 

That does n't sound right, does it ? You say that 
the third line is too long. Well, it has seven 
syllables, and in the same poem we find 

And streaming and shining on, 

which also has seven syllables. Try this : 

O young Skipper, 
You from the harbor 
Under the foreland, 

and compare it with the original : 

O young Mariner, 
You from the haven 
Under the sea-cliff. 

As we reflect on the reasons why the one 
sounds right, as we say, and the other does n't, 
we shall discover that there are two principal 
ones, and perhaps only two. The first concerns 
the sound of the word in itself and in relation 
to others — the proportion of light and heavy 
syllables, the number and order of vowels, 
liquids, dentals, gutturals. Compare in this re- 
spect 

The crash of the charges 
with 

By warble of water. 



94 RELATION OF WORDS TO LITERATURE 

The other relates to meaning and associations, 
and associations are sometimes more than half 
the meaning. Thus the word shipper ought to 
suggest to us skiff, or ship — words to which it 
is etymologically akin. It would be ignorance, 
or mischief, or sheer perversity that would insist 
upon any connection with the verb skip, or with 
skipper in any sense derived from the verb skip ; 
yet if that association should arise of itself, 
how fatal it would be to our enjoyment of the 
stanza ! But it does not need this particular 
association to bar the word ; skipper will not do, 
and sea-dog will not do, nor will promontory 
do instead of sea-cliff. But why will not harbor 
do ? If we look at Tennyson's use of it, we can 
perhaps determine. In Enoch Arden (115-6) 
we are told of Enoch that once 

— Clambering on a mast 
In harbor, by mischance he slipt and fell. 

Later in the poem, the officers and men of the 
ship which carried him back first made up a 
purse for him, 

Then moving up the coast they landed him 
Even in that harbor whence he sailed before. 

And now, in contrast with shipper and harbor, 
consider mariner and haven. First mariner, 
associated as it is with our thoughts of The An- 



MORE AND LESS KNOWLEDGE 95 

dent Mariner, and with the line of The Lotus- 
Eaters (173) : 
O rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more. 

And then haven, how it brings back — 

And the stately ships go on 
To their haven under the hill. 

Ask us if we know haven, harbor, mariner, 
and we confidently, almost scornfully, answer 
yes, that we cannot remember when we did n't 
know them; but isn't there a difference, after 
all, between knowing and knowing, between 
knowing as merely recognizing and knowing as 
possessing the inmost secrets of a word — the 
whole range of its melody, the whole hideous- 
ness of its cacophony, the whole train of shadowy 
forms which it evokes, stretching on and on 
with various degrees of palpability and evanes- 
cence, some bold and distinct, and others melt- 
ing, like the faintest curl of a summer cloud, into 
the viewless air ? But if we are to attain this — 
this sense not only of the word in itself, but of 
its contrasting values, and what we may call its 
combining power, we must have a much more 
extensive and perfect apparatus than at present. 
For this purpose we need concordances of many 
more authors, and lexicons of some — the means 
of confronting, not merely word with word, but 
context with context, passage with passage, poem 



96 RELATION OF WORDS TO LITERATURE 

with poem. There is before me at this moment 
talent and industry enough to make priceless 
additions, in the course of two or three years, 
to our resources for exploring and evaluating 
the treasures of our tongue, and for providing 
teachers of literature with instruments for con- 
veying to the minds and hearts of their stu- 
dents the most delicate, the most precious, the 
most vital products of all civilization. The tasks 
are comparatively simple ; the most that they 
demand is industry and a devoted spirit, such 
industry and devotion as have linked insepara- 
bly, for all time, the name of Bartlett with the 
name of Shakespeare, and the name of Ellis 
with that of Shelley. 

I had hoped to dwell at some length on stanza 
4 of the Merlin poem — on the wild animals, in 
Old English ' wild deer,' from which the wilder- 
ness takes its name ; on the griffins, and giants, 
and dragons, all of them Greek, yet bowing here 
to the Celtic enchantment ; on elf, which is Ger- 
manic ; on fairy — which originally meant not 
a being, but magic, and then fairy-land and 
fairy-folk, before it came to mean the individual 
fairy — and how fairy, or rather fay, comes from 
the Latin fatum, so that fairies are a kind of 
Fates ; on gnome, and how Paracelsus, the Para- 
celsus of Browning's poem, coined the name, 



POSSIBILITIES OF VERBAL STUDY 97 

and the Jewish cabalists, long centuries before, 
perhaps evolved the idea ; on all the downpour 
and crash of wild and ruining waters in cataract, 
and how it differs from cascade, and waterfall, 
and fall ; on all the sweet humanities inherent 
in music, the art of the Muses, and how Plato 
calls the study of philosophy the noblest and 
best of music ; * and then point out how Tenny- 
son brings together these two magnificent words, 
cataract and music, in the same line. I might 
have gone over all the verbs which express the 
motion of the Gleam — and its rest — asking you 
to remark their variety, and their specific appro- 
priateness in each instance; or I might have 
called attention to the twofold appeal to the 
senses made by the poem, how light and music 
conspire, how 

Moving to melody, 
Floated The Gleam, 

and how, when 

The landskip darkened, 
The melody deadened. 

I have wished, however, merely to do one thing 
— to show you by a few examples the relation 
of words to literature, in order to emphasize the 
relation of the study of words to the study of 
literature ; to show you, if I could, that the study 
1 Phcedo 61 A. 



98 RELATION OF WORDS TO LITERATURE 

of words might be so intense and penetrating 
as to conduce to the perception of literary value 
and beauty ; in short, to persuade you, if you 
needed persuasion, that there might be a study 
of linguistics which should be literary, as there 
might be a study of literature which should be 
linguistic. 



IV 

AIMS IN THE GRADUATE STUDY OF 
ENGLISH 



AIMS IN THE GRADUATE STUDY 
OP ENGLISH 1 

Into an age of gold like ours, which is, by rea- 
son of that fact, an age of iron ; into an age of 
strenuous endeavor, to what end men know not, 
and seem not to care ; into an age of intellectual 
ferment, which precipitates nothing precious and 
substantial ; into an age which everywhere seeks 
out origins, and ignores a Primal Cause ; into 
an age which tosses in fevered unrest, reaching 
out blindly for a dimly apprehended good, are 
born, must be born from time to time, those 
who are to point to the fountains of cool water, 
to the true riches, to the Source and Aim of 
man's transitory life upon earth. They must 
be born, if matter is not permanently to enthrall 
spirit, the enduring to be even as the ephem- 
eral ; unless man is to reel back into the beast, 
and rage and wallow like the dragon of the slime. 
They must be born, or else, to man at least, 

The pillared firmament is rottenness, 
And earth's base built on stubble. 

1 Address delivered at Princeton University, January 13, 1906. 

L.0FC. 



102 THE GRADUATE STUDY OF ENGLISH 

How, when born, are they to be discovered, 
shown their appointed task, and so trained that 
they shall work effectively towards peace, har- 
mony, justice, stability, and all the ends of spir- 
itual being ? This is the master-problem of the 
State, and the State delegates it, in large mea- 
sure, to the University, as the University shares 
it, in turn, with its constituent bodies and with 
the educational agencies subordinate to it. How 
shall the true leaders of humanity be selected, 
and disciplined for their mission? This, I re- 
peat, is the chief problem^ as its solution is the 
prime function, of the University, since upon 
finding its answer the very existence of the 
State depends ; and it is a problem which by 
no other agency can be solved so well. 

Such being the case — for I assume that on 
this point there will be no dissent — there have 
been, and in that sense are, three classes of spir- 
itual leaders who stand preeminent above others. 
They are not alone ; they are powerfully rein- 
forced by the representatives of other classes; 
but in the nature of things, and notwithstanding 
the deficiencies or unworthiness of individual 
members, they have stood, and deserve to stand, 
above all the rest. These three classes are: 
ministers of religion ; poets ; and teachers of 
the humanities — by humanities meaning the 
branches of learning which are concerned pri- 



THE CLERGYMAN AND THE POET 10# 

marily with the nobler spiritual achievements 
and possibilities of human nature. 

Of these, the minister of religion, in his two- 
fold function of prophet and priest — Aaron and 
Moses in one — ought to be more serviceable 
to man than either of the others. His office 
is directly authorized by God; he is supposed 
to enter it with the fullest conviction and the 
most ardent zeal; he is inducted into it with 
the most solemn sanctions ; he consecrates hu- 
manity at the three chief epochs or crises of 
its existence — before the cradle, the marriage- 
altar, and the tomb ; and he is listened to with 
attention, if not always with reverence, whenever 
he speaks in his sacred character. 

The poet represents for our purpose the whole 
confraternity of artists, partly because the range 
of his expression is wider than that of any other 
artist — since he can at once suggest sculpture 
and utter himself in music — and partly because 
he can search more deeply, and stir more power- 
fully, the secret places of the soul. Dante rules 
a more extensive domain than Giotto, or Fra 
Angelico, or Botticelli, and with a more absolute 
sway, since he rules them also. Even when we 
are inclined to object the variety of arts in which 
Michael Angelo excelled, we must not forget 
that Dante was his master, too. Now, the poet at 
his highest is the unaccredited ambassador from 



x04 THE GRADUATE STUDY OF ENGLISH 

heaven to earth. He is God's spy, unavowed, 
sent to unriddle the moral universe in the inter- 
est of man, to exhibit its cosmical beauty, to set 
it to music. With the poet we should class the 
philosopher of clearest and most piercing vision 
— such revealers as Plato, who suggest more 
than they can distinctly express. 

The third class, the expounders of the human- 
ities, comprises all true teachers of literature, 
history, and philosophy. They are the ones who 
build up in the spirit of their pupils, by the 
systematic processes of academic instruction, 
the vision of a noble past or of a noble future. 
The teacher of philosophy, by disclosing what is 
innate in man as man, points directly to future 
realizations of his true self. The gaze of the 
teacher of history or literature is rather retro- 
spective, in so far as he tries to re-create the great 
past in the imagination of his hearers. But the 
philosopher must also rehearse the history of 
thought, while history and literature are full 
of inspiration for him who would work in the 
present. The historian deals primarily with 
man organized — politically, socially, or eco- 
nomically — and therefore seems often to be 
concerned with the shell or husk of things ; yet 
there is no just reason why he may not view the 
past as keenly as Shakespeare. The business of 
the teacher of literature is essentially with the 



THE PROVINCES OF LITERATURE 105 

heart of man, yet he may broaden his scope to 
contemplate ideal commonwealths, or the golden 
days of Pericles and the Antonines. 

The teachers of literature are conventionally 
classified into teachers of Greek, of Latin, of 
Italian, French, German, English, and the like ; 
yet for our purpose they have one common func- 
tion, to make man free of his own heritage, to 
acquaint him with the hill-tops and dingles, the 
groves and streams, the highways and paths, of 
his own spiritual estate. What man has achieved, 
or conceived of himself as achieving, in the realm 
of spirit, is their common subject. Their prov- 
inces are not 4 conterminous; they overlap, or are 
superimposed. No one can comprehend Latin 
literature who is not versed in its Greek anteced- 
ents, nor Italian or French literature who knows 
nothing of Latin writers, nor English literature 
who knows not something of all these. I am ac- 
quainted with a teacher of Homer who has Milton 
always on his tongue in the class-room, and a 
teacher of Milton who has ransacked the ancient 
classics for the materials which are woven into 
the fabric of Paradise Lost and the minor poems. 
Shorey's edition of Horace will occur to you 
all as a book replete with apt quotations from 
English literature, and this is as it should be. 
How should we like to be taught Goethe by a 
man whose imagination had never traveled to the 



106 THE GRADUATE STUDY OF ENGLISH 

shores of the Mediterranean? What should we 
say of the teacher of Moliere who knew nothing 
of Plautus and Terence, or the teacher of Wyatt 
and Surrey who knew nothing of Petrarch ? 

So far, then, as literature is concerned, we 
might appropriately have one great department, 
with the fullest coordination and interrelation 
among its several provinces. In it each teacher, 
nominally assigned to represent a nationality or 
an epoch, should be encouraged to make himself 
to some reasonable extent free of all, and, while 
emphasizing his own special branch of the total 
subject, should draw illustrations and compari- 
sons from every quarter. 

But the creators of literature, and the races 
of which they are the most eminent spokesmen, 
reveal themselves not alone through drama and 
lyric, through epic and prose narrative, regarded 
as wholes. Every fragment of such composi- 
tions, every minutest element, nay, every indi- 
vidual word, bears its proportion of the poetry 
diffused throughout the whole. Language, we 
are told, is fossil poetry ; and it is so even when 
detached from its place in masterpieces, and 
even, to some extent, when it has never found 
its way into masterpieces at all. For the creative 
impulse in the heart of man discloses itself not 
alone in great syntheses, an Odyssey or a King 
Lear, but also in single phrases, even in single 



LINGUISTICS RELATED TO LITERATURE 107 

words, as yet, perhaps, uncombined into any- 
thing properly to be called literature. Every 
such word, in each several language, has its own 
aura of associations, due to its primal meaning 
and to all the experiences through which it has 
passed since its birth. Just as grief and joy 
print their traces on the countenance, and just as 
the original configuration of the features is deter- 
mined in large measure by heredity, so words 
acquire their peculiar character, — bearing, as it 
were, the stamp of many dies, which have im- 
pressed themselves in succession, and with vary- 
ing force, upon the original physiognomy. Does 
peace or joy mean the same thing to us as pax 
or gaudium to Julius Caesar ? I trow not. Do 
gaudy and joyous suggest to us identical notions ? 
Yet, according to our best information, they 
spring from the same original. The teacher of 
Greek or Grerman, then — to confine ourselves 
for the moment to languages relatively underiva- 
tive — has, besides his general interest in all 
literatures related to his own, a more particular 
interest in these fragments or elements of litera- 
ture which we call words, or, collectively, lan- 
guage. Moreover, in the modern tongues at 
least, and most of all in English, he has to reckon 
with forms which have been derived from other 
languages, and with attempts, by means of na- 
tive terms, to express thoughts which have ori- 



108 THE GRADUATE STUDY OF ENGLISH 

ginated in earlier civilizations, and have been 
communicated from these older civilizations to 
the newer. Hence, much as the teacher of 
French or Italian — and the same thing applies, 
in a still higher degree, to the teacher of Eng- 
lish — may need, when dealing with the lin- 
guistic portion of his task, to specialize within 
the native language itself, he needs hardly less 
to extend his survey to include those tongues 
which have had a direct and powerful influence 
upon the one he professes. 

Incidentally, the teacher of Latin, or Ger- 
man, or other foreign tongue, must impart to 
the student such rudimentary knowledge of the 
language as shall enable him to read it, or pos- 
sibly to write or converse in it ; but this func- 
tion may be regarded as distinctly subordinate 
to that upon which we have touched above. The 
drill-master in Latin paradigms, for instance, 
may be a useful member of society, but if he 
is merely or chiefly that, he belongs to a dis- 
tinctly inferior class to that of the teacher of 
the humanities. Indeed, he must take good 
care that he do not become, both by precept and 
example, a propagator of inhumanities, since 
mere task-work, unilluminated and uncheered 
by the contemplation of ideal ends, tends rather 
to deaden, to degrade, and to brutalize than to 
soften and refine. 



ABDICATION OF THE CLERGYMAN 109 

I have said that, in my opinion, there are three 
classes of men who, beyond any others, raise the 
human species out of savagery, or prevent it 
from relapsing into that state. These, I repeat, 
are the ministers of religion, the poets — a kind 
of generic term which designates the arts in gen- 
eral by the chief of all arts — and the teachers 
of the humanities. Now, viewed at the present 
juncture, what place — what rank, if you will — 
is to be held, is likely to be held, in the next 
generation or so, by the teacher of English in 
America ? As one looks out over the face of the 
country, and over many parts of what we call the 
civilized world, he sees that, speaking generallyij 
the professional minister of religion has virtually' 
abdicated his function of authoritative spiritual 
leadership, largely because he is himself devoid 
of certitude regarding the things whereof it is 
his mission to speak. Either he doubts the truth 
of a divine revelation, or of a divine government 
of the world, or the genuineness of particular 
revelations, or the inferences which have been 
currently drawn from such particular revelations, 
or the systems which have been constructed from 
the supposed truths of revelation philosophically 
considered. Under such circumstances he neces- 
sarily ceases to be an authoritative spiritual 
leader, except as he deserves or obtains credence 
and following in his incidental character as poet, 



110 THE GRADUATE STUDY OF ENGLISH 

or philosopher, or unavowed prophet. He loses 
all support from divine revelation as contained 
in a certain closed and canonical body of writ- 
ings, or Scriptures, and all support from a co- 
herent body of truths, representing the efforts 
made by certain master-minds, singly or in com- 
bination, to codify the truths of revelation in 
the light of nature and human experience. He 
stands by himself, and has just as much or as 
little authority as he can gain in his character 
of unaccredited seer, or vates ; he tells people 
what he personally has discovered, or passes on 
to them what he individually thinks best worthy 
of report in the writings of other men. In the 
discharge of this latter function — namely, in 
the reporting to others of what he discovers in 
books, with or without indorsement or criticism 
— he passes into our third class, and becomes 
little more than a teacher of literature. 

As to the second class, the poets, there seem 
at present to be virtually none with a message, 
that is, none who announce with decision and 
persuasiveness a doctrine, or view of the moral 
universe, such as has power to stir men's souls 
and lift them above their customary and com- 
monplace moods. Neither are there any who are 
concerned to present with cogency and charm 
the more compelling doctrines of an earlier time. 
The versifiers of the present have neither stolen 



THE NEW POETRY 111 

fire from heaven themselves, nor are they, with 
few and trifling exceptions, bearing torches of 
borrowed fire to kindle flame in the hearts of 
men. They are, for the most part, persons with 
a laborious or easy knack of melodious phrase- 
making, retailers of poetical truisms, recorders 
of certain aspects of the physical world, search- 
ers after the eccentric and bizarre, or the like. 
Who is there that is at once fresh, vigorous, 
authentic, and inspiring? We do not even have 
their counterparts in prose, such men as Car- 
lyle, or Ruskin, or Emerson, or Newman. Not 
only are the sun and moon gone from the heav- 
ens, but the great planets are extinguished, 
Orion has been flung from his lofty watch-tower, 
Sirius is dead, and both pole-star and Greater 
Bear have sunk beneath the baths of ocean. 

As an example of meaningless modern verse, 
with just enough melody and trick of pretty 
phrase to give it plausibility, take the following, 
which is drawn from a current magazine : 

At the silken sign of the Poppy, 

At a shop that is never old, 
Where the twilight silence lingers, 

It is there that dreams are sold. 

There 's the scent of love's lost roses, 
The soft echo of childhood's laugh ; 

There 's the ring of empty glasses, 
For the white lips never quaff. 



112 THE GRADUATE STUDY OF ENGLISH 

To the crimson sign of the Poppy 

We shall come when the daylight dies, 

When the curfew music quivers 
'Neath the gray of evening skies. 

Just beyond the gates of sunset, 

Where the grim toll of death we pay, 

We shall find the shop of dream-wares, 
Where the poppies hang alway. 

So we long for the dusk of twilight, 
When with wealth or no earthly gold, 

We shall come where sleep-flowers cluster, 
To the shops where dreams are sold. 

We see that, according to the new poetic creed, 
death is something more than an eternal sleep. 
It is a Celestial dream, fed with unlimited opium 
(to be consumed, we may suppose, in an imperish- 
able pipe) — moistened by an imperceptible 
stimulant, malt or vinous, for this point is left 
undetermined — and perfumed by love's lost 
roses. Such verse sounds like a parody on 
itself, and reminds us of Calverley's caricature 
of some of the poetry of his own time : 

In moss-prankt dells which the sunbeams flatter, 
(And heaven it knoweth what that may mean ; 
Meaning, however, is no great matter) 
When woods are a-tremble, with rifts a-tween. . . . 

In prose, take the exquisite preciosity of Mark 
Twain's famous screed, and see how easily it 



TEACHERS OF FOREIGN LITERATURES 113 

might deceive the inattentive into the conviction 
that here was a prose poem of rarest charm : 

It was a crisp and spicy morning in early October. 
The lilacs and laburnums, lit with the glory fires of 
autumn, hung burning and flashing in the upper air, 
a fairy bridge provided by kind Nature for the wing- 
less wild things that have their home in the tree-tops 
and would visit together ; the larch and the pome- 
granate flung their purple and yellow flames in bril- 
liant broad splashes along the slanting sweep of the 
woodland ; the sensuous fragrance of innumerable de- 
ciduous flowers rose upon the swooning atmosphere : 
far in the empty sky a solitary oesophagus slept upon 
motionless wing ; everywhere brooded stillness, se- 
renity, and the peace of God. 1 

If now, putting aside contemporary poets and 
prose writers, we come down to our third class, 
the teachers of the humanities, and especially 
to the teachers of the various literatures, we find 
the condition of things somewhat as follows. 
Whatever, ideally considered, is the function of 
the teachers of German, French, Spanish, etc., 
we find them actually occupied, for the most 
part, in enabling their pupils merely to read 
those languages intelligently, so that they have 
comparatively little time for imbuing them with 
the virtues of the literatures themselves. In 
other words, they are discharging a necessary, 

1 Harper's Magazine 104, 264 (January, 1902). 



114 THE GRADUATE STUDY OF ENGLISH 

but subordinate duty, growing out of their great 
mission as teachers of the respective literatures, 
but leaving in large measure the mission itself 
unfulfilled. 

/ Among the humanities, Greek has for gener- 
I ations held an almost undisputed primacy, not 

v without good reason. Now, however, we find its 
ministers, like those of religion, forced more and 
more to abdicate, or at least to consent to a 
retrenchment of their privileges. This is partly 
their own fault, I fear. They have insisted un- 
duly upon what other people have regarded as 
mint, and anise, and cummin, neglecting the 
weightier matters of the law. They have not 
brought out of their treasure-houses things new, 
as well as things old. They have not sufficiently 
related their stores to the interests or needs of 
modern life. They have not considered them- 
selves as hierophants of priceless mysteries so 
much as masters of a certain abracadabra, tra- 
ditionally regarded as having a kind of magical 
potency. 

Here, it would seem, are reasons enough why 
they have fallen, or are falling, from their high 
estate. But the cause is not less to be sought 
in the attitude of the public towards the real 
treasures of which they have been the appointed 
custodians. A democracy does not readily toler- 
ate superiority of any kind. A materialistic age 



WHY GREEK IS IN ECLIPSE 115 

does not contemplate with rapturous satisfaction 
the things of the spirit. The transcendent and 
the mystical are despised by people who imagine 
that physical science has unlocked, or is soon to 
unlock, the last dim and remote chamber of the 
universe, and flood it with the light of common 
day. The self-activity of the mind is irksome to 
those who respond only to sensual excitations," 
who can be thrilled only by the speed of an 
automobile, the soarings of an air-ship, or the 
sinkings of a submarine boat. People whose 
grandfathers could not read, and whose fathers 
barely learned to, feel that there is much for 
them to do before they begin to climb the far- 
off summits of Hellenic wisdom and beauty ; 
and indeed they are right. Those who are poor, 
and are determined to be rich, cannot see how 
Greek will give them the Midas-touch. Those 
who are rich, and consider no evil so dire as 
poverty, have their own realms of gold to travel 
in, and think those of Keats mean in compari- 
son. In short, those who are prosaic find Greek 
too poetic, those, who fancy themselves poetic 
find Greek too severe, those who like ease find 
Greek too hard, those who are barbarous find 
Greek too civilized, and those who are sophis- 
ticated find Greek too simple. ' The reason 
why the seven stars are no more than seven is a 
pretty one,' says the bitter fool to Lear, and the 



116 THE GRADUATE STUDY OF ENGLISH 

reasons why Greek is not at present in favor, 
if not so pretty, are at least more numerous, 
and quite as decisive. The more honor to such 
a University as yours, which, mindful that a 
great University should not be the sport of 
every popular gust, still exalts Greek to a place 
of prominence, and abides in calm prevision of 
the time when it shall again come to its own. 
/ As to Latin, it seems to have neither the im- 
mediate and pecuniary utility of French and 
German, nor the eminence which appertains to 
VGreek. It is not to the same degree as Greek 
an instrument of generous nurture and high 
breeding, nor will it lend itself to the purposes 
of the market-place so readily as French and 
German. Yet if Latin is to pass into eclipse, 
its occultation is likely to be slower, partly be- 
cause it is more easily learned than Greek, and 
will therefore serve for those who wish cheaply 
to acquire an aristocratic tincture, and partly 
because it has entered so largely into English 
and other modern tongues. 

This brings us at last to English itself, the 
goal of all our devious wanderings. Now, while 
we must recognize, at once and unequivocally, 
the inferiority of the English teacher to the 
adequate minister of religion, or to the artist of 
penetrative imagination, we cannot help seeing 
that circumstances have devolved upon him a 



THE NEW POSITION OF ENGLISH 117 

task the more momentous because these guides 
and educers of the human spirit are absent from 
their appointed places, or raise nerveless arms 
to point aimlessly and convulsively to all the 
quarters of the heaven — and the earth. So, 
too, as long as Greek stood in the van, supported 
in more sober and pedestrian ways by Latin, 
the teacher of English could feel that his was a 
humbler place in the rear, that he was a useful 
auxiliary, but hardly a principal. Of late, how- 
ever, conditions have changed so rapidly that 
this theory has ceased to be quite tenable. Greek 
no longer occupies the centre of the stage, but is 
retreating, rather unceremoniously hastened at 
times, towards the tiring-room and the exit. Is 
the stage to be left empty ? That can hardly be. 
The most obvious candidate for the vacant place 
is English, and in fact English has been thrust 
forward with a rapidity almost alarming, in view 
of the fact that most of us who represent it have 
been brought up with a lower conception of our 
responsibilities, and with a more restricted view 
of our opportunities, than is indicated by the 
present exigency. Upon us, it would seem, the 
ends of the ages have come, and we are reminded 
of the words of Paul to the Corinthian brethren : 

Neither let us try the Lord, as some of them tried, 
and perished by the serpents. Neither murmur ye, 
as some of them murmured, and perished by the de- 



118 THE GRADUATE STUDY OF ENGLISH 

stroyer. Now these things happened unto them by way 
of example ; and they were written for our admoni- 
tion, upon whom the ends of the ages are come. 

I well remember the impressive conclusion of 
an address before English students by a pro- 
fessor of Greek a couple of years ago, in which 
he warned them that English was now on its 
trial, as Greek had been, and that if English 
failed to answer the high expectations which 
had been formed of it, it would fall. 

Perhaps it is now time for us to consider what 
are some of the demands at present made upon 
the professor of English. They are not all nom- 
inated in the bond of his election, but sooner or 
later he is made to smart under the conscious- 
ness that the public, or his academic colleagues, 
or his fellow-scholars, have reasonably been look- 
ing to him to do what he was never prepared 
for, what he is quite unequal to, and what, until a 
particular exigency has arisen, he may scarcely 
have reflected upon as belonging to his province. 

Let me set down briefly, in topical form, some 
of these requirements, which, according to cir- 
cumstances likely to occur in any individual 
experience, he may be called upon to meet. 
The teacher of English, then, or at least the Uni- 
versity teacher, must 

1. Speak and write the English language with 
propriety. His verbs must agree with their sub- 



DEMANDS ON THE ENGLISH TEACHER 119 

/ jects ; he must pronounce according to acknow- 
ledged standards, so far as there are such; and 
he must use words in their accepted senses. 

2. He must be able to make himself heard 
in addressing a class or an audience. He must 
enunciate distinctly, and speak with sufficient 
vigor to convey his full meaning, and, if possi- 
ble, impress it upon his hearers. It may be said 
that so much, at least, should be expected of all 
teachers ; this is true, but the deficiency is more 
likely to be censured in the case of a teacher of 
English. 

3. He must be sufficiently informed with re- 
spect to the history of his own and kindred liter- 
atures, and sufficiently versed in their master- 
pieces and critical works. 

4. He must be filled with the spirit of the 
best literature — not of all literature, not even 
of all English literature, but of the best. 

5. He must know good style, good composi- 
tion, and good sense when he sees them, in both 
poetry and prose, and also bad style, bad com- 
position, and nonsense. He must know why the 
good is good, and the bad bad; and he must 
know varying degrees of goodness and badness, 
so as to pass rational judgment upon a work 
submitted to him. 

6. He must be able to read with tolerable 
facility, and explain to others, the English of 



120 THE GRADUATE STUDY OF ENGLISH 

all periods, from the days of King Alfred to 
the present. 

7. He must be able to read the languages 
upon which English is chiefly dependent for 
vocabulary or literary influence. 

8. He must know the pedagogical theory of 
his own subject, that is, of English considered 
comprehensively: its chief divisions and their 
interrelations, and the disciplines by which re- 
sults of different kinds can be attained, whether 
by individuals or classes. Thus, in directing the 
affairs of a department as its head, he should 
be able to decide what subjects should be pur- 
sued under given conditions; what should be 
made obligatory, and what elective ; in what 
order they should be disposed, having due regard 
to the average age and attainment of particular 
classes ; and how to secure a climactic result. 

9. He must know the scholarly theory of his 
subject, that is, what is the present condition of 
scholarship in English, and its chief deficiencies, 
as compared with the most developed subjects of 
like general character ; and how to achieve the 
best scholarly results with the smallest expendi- 
ture of time and energy. 

10. He must know the relations of English to 
other subjects of instruction, in order that he may 
avail himself of the assistance which may be 
gained from the work in those departments ; in 



DEMANDS ON THE ENGLISH TEACHER 121 

order that he may secure for English its proper 
proportion of time and attention ; and in order 
that he may not trespass upon other depart- 
ments, either by transgressing the due limits of 
his own, or by demanding an undue proportion 
of the time and energy of his students. 

11. He must be able to win and maintain for 
himself a place as scholar or independent inves- 
tigator. Without this he cannot count on the 
respect of his professional brethren in other in- 
stitutions, and without their respect he cannot, 
in general, hope to secure and hold the highest 
respect of his immediate colleagues in other 
branches, of his departmental subordinates, of 
his students, of the discerning public — or even, 
I may add, of himself. Now, in comparison with 
his colleagues in other departments, it is doubly 
and trebly incumbent upon him to possess this 
respect, because he is succeeding to dignities and 
responsibilities which, it may easily be assumed, 
he has not earned, and does not merit. 

12. He should be a gentleman, and, if con- 
venient, a good fellow, in the better sense of that 
term. 

Now who is sufficient for these things ? No- 
body ; we may as well frankly confess it at once. 
Yet which of these requirements shall we cut 
out ? Shall we say that the person who profes- 
sionally represents English scholarship, and the 



122 THE GRADUATE STUDY OF ENGLISH 

beauty and splendor of English literature, is 
privileged to mispronounce it, to write ungram- 
matically, and to sign his letters ' Sincerely, 
John Jones,' as though there were some question 
of his being John Jones ? May he mumble or 
drone before a class ? May he be ignorant of 
Paradise Lost and Bacon's Essays, of the Anti- 
gone and the Alcestis, of Virgil and Juvenal, of 
Tasso and Moliere, of Longinus and Aristotle's 
Poetics f May he, with a limited time in which 
to perform a task of great moment, of vital con- 
cern to the very existence of the Republic, teach 
the trashy and the ephemeral for lack of a sense 
of values, and thus for all time befuddle the 
judgment, and degrade the taste, of his pupils ? 
May he, depending merely upon his own sensi- 
bility and intuitive perceptions, content himself 
with reading good literature aloud to them, or 
telling them to read it, without being able to 
explain wherein the goodness of good literature 
consists ? May he already begin to regard Spen- 
ser and Skelton as Old English, find difficulty 
with Chaucer, and show that English before the 
coming of the Normans is quite beyond the pale 
of his knowledge and his sympathies? May he 
be unable to read Horace in the original, to 
avail himself of German investigations, and to 
learn from the French the secret of scholarship 
which is not pedantry, and of charm which is 



DEMANDS ON THE ENGLISH TEACHER 123 

neither shallow nor pretentious? May he, if a 
subordinate, be so unversed in the theory of his 
subject as not to understand how to make the 
branch he is teaching at the moment contribute, 
in an effective way, toward a total insight, or, if 
a leader, how to marshal his forces so as to win 
the completest possible victory over the forces 
of Chaos and old Night ? May he, if he under- 
takes to beat back the limits of our present igno- 
rance, be so untutored as to spend his energies 
upon tasks already accomplished, to undertake 
those that are relatively insignificant, or to be 
handicapped every moment by ignorance of his 
tools, or of the proper way of using them ? May 
he, instead of dovetailing English in with other 
subjects in such a way as to assist his colleagues 
while drawing strength and support from them, 
be at liberty unconsciously to thwart their en- 
deavors, or else so contract the bounds of his 
own department as to deprive it of its legitimate 
efficiency ? May he be a man without standing 
in the court of his peers, a man of whom Eng- 
lish teachers in. other Universities have never 
heard, or whose name they mention only to scoff ? 
Finally, may he be a boor, a man whose society 
his fellows shun ? 

These questions answer themselves, and yet is 
there any representative of English in an Amer- 
ican University, who, judged fairly by these 



124 THE GRADUATE STUDY OF ENGLISH 

standards, is in all respects fitted to occupy his 
place ? If we are obliged to reply in the nega- 
tive, it behooves us to see to it that the next 
generation is better supplied than our own. 
Grant that what we have sketched is an ideal, 
and, as an ideal, impossible of perfect realiza- 
tion, is it not our duty to strive toward it as 
resolutely as we may? 

If now we address ourselves to the means 
that may be employed in training candidates 
for this high office, we are naturally impelled to 
consider, first of all, what agencies characteristic 
of our time may be invoked to further our efforts. 
We shall find, I think, upon a little reflection, 
that the present age is distinguished by these 
five things — by others, perhaps, but certainly, 
I believe, by these five : 

1. A passion for discovery, and proximate or 
elementary classification, having primary refer- 
ence to utility — the love of science. 

2. A disposition to emphasize the notion of 
becoming, or, as a German would say, das Wer~ 
den — an interest in evolution. 

3. A readiness to perceive deity as permeative 
— to accept the doctrine of the divine immanence. 

4. A passion for voluntary association — the 
club spirit. 

5. A desire for social justice, or the common 
weal — philanthropy, the love of man as man. 



FIVE HELPFUL AGENCIES 125 

You will see that these things — scientific zeal, 
insistence upon the doctrine of evolution, a will- 
ingness to entertain the idea of the divine im- 
manence, the club spirit, and devotion to the 
cause of humanity — are all Greek, or at least 
that they were all enounced and illustrated in 
Greece, and that they are all, therefore, in some 
sense, phases of neo-paganism, or, if you dis- 
like that word, neo-classicism, or neo-Hellenism. 
They by no means comprise all of Hellenism, 
and perhaps they do not comprise the best of 
Hellenism, but it is fair enough to call them 
all Hellenic. 

Now, how may these five agencies be made to 
assist in the discipline of the spiritual leaders 
whom we call teachers of English ? When winds 
blow, we let them turn our wheels ; when streams 
descend, we float with their current, or transform 
their energy into electricity. We should be fool- 
ish if we were not in all ways economical, doing; 
as little as possible against the grain. How, then^' 
can we harness these forces, and direct them tdi 
the end we have in view ? 

Take first science. This can be made an in- 
strument of training, and a producer of useful 
results, by means of the elaboration of indexes, 
glossaries, catalogues, phonological and syntac- 
tical monographs, and the like. These acquaint 
the student with facts, the raw material of science, 



126 THE GRADUATE STUDY OF ENGLISH 

and induct him into the processes employed by 
his acknowledged masters, the methods of selec- 
tion and arrangement without which science is 
impossible. As a propaedeutic to original work 
of this kind, it is useful to have courses for the 
study of works which embody the spirit and 
method of science, and which afford opportu- 
nity for elementary practice on the part of the 
students themselves. The actual performance 
of the substantial tasks, and the subsequent pub- 
lication of the results, should also gratify the 
social instinct — the instinct to associate oneself, 
at least in thought, with the life of humanity — 
and confer the sense of benefiting mankind. Of 
course the scientific impulse, if sufficiently deep 
and sustained, ought to eventuate in philosophy ; 
but it may accomplish much that is serviceable 
without going so far. Yet, useful as it is, we 
must be on our guard against overrating it, pre- 
cisely because it is so emphasized by our times. 
Next the notion of evolution. That impels one 
backward into the past, and prophetically into 
the future. It gives zest to all historical study, 
even of events and periods which until recently 
were thought dry and barren. It irrigates desert 
soil, so to speak, making it bud and blossom as 
the rose. It is this which has sent people back 
into Old English, and back of Old English into 
Gothic, and back of Gothic into Sanskrit and 



THE IDEA OF EVOLUTION 127 

the hypothetical Indo-European unity. In phi- 
lology, it is made to bear fruit in monographs on 
the evolution of this or that literary form — the 
evolution of the drama, the epic, the essay, and 
the like, and in such studies of individuals as 
Texte's book on Rousseau, or Morel's on James 
Thomson, for instance, or Legouis's on Words- 
worth. In France, Brunetiere is the apostle of 
evolution in this form. It is, however, often 
posited in monographic investigations where the 
gaps in the material are sufficient to prevent the 
tracing of an evolution at all, or where evolu- 
tion has been interrupted by disturbing forces, 
or where the human spirit has seemed to defy 
the principle of determinism. Do the Middle 
Ages fully account for Dante, or the Renaissance 
for Shakespeare? Yet, with much caution in 
its employment, lest it mislead and confuse the 
novice, rather than clarify and settle his ideas, 
it may be of real utility. 

The idea of the divine immanence is related 
to that of evolution, and tends in a still higher 
degree, perhaps, to harmonize the phenomena 
of history, and provide a goal for the stumbling 
feet of science. If there is 

One far-off, divine event, 

To which the whole creation moves, 

then it must be not only because 

Heaven lies about us in our infancy, 



128 THE GRADUATE STUDY OF ENGLISH 

and lay about the whole universe in its infancy, 
but also because of 

— Something far more deeply interfused, 
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
And the round ocean and the living air, 
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man. 

This notion will serve as a living link between 
much of nineteenth-century poetry, for instance, 
and the poets and philosophers of Greece ; and 
such living links, binding organically together 
the phenomena of various literary periods, can- 
not be too highly prized. 

What I have called the club spirit may be 
utilized in the formation of associations for the 
study in common of various topics, or for the 
performance of cooperative undertakings like 
the New English Dictionary, the Dialect Diction- 
/ ary, or the projected Tennyson Concordance * 
at Baylor University. Associations may take the 
form of Journal Clubs, for report on current pe- 
riodicals, or Keport Clubs, for calling attention 
to current professional publications of all kinds, 
or English Clubs of a more general nature, for 
the presentation and discussion of any subject 
which may properly come before it. Not less im- 
portant is the promotion of general sociability 
and good fellowship, the value of which between 

1 Since this was written, a movement for a Concordance 
Society has been instituted. 



DEVOTION TO HUMANITY 129 



be a I 

Q Of 



kindred and aspiring souls may be illustrated 
from the University life of Tennyson and his 
intimate friends. 

Devotion to the cause of humanity may 
strongly impelling force in the production 
scholarly work, and thus render the student 
much more keen in the prosecution of the neces- 
sary propaedeutical studies. A desire not to lose 
touch with humanity will be the best safeguard 
against egotistical and repulsive pedantry. More- 
over, without the passion to serve humanity, the 
English teacher is likely to be of comparatively 
little use in the class-room, whereas with it, even 
if his training be somewhat defective, he may 
still accomplish something worth while. 

It must be evident, I think, that the student 
has much to gain from the gratification of these 
impulses, which are at present so common that 
they may almost be called natural. But a dis- 
position difficult to acquire, and indispensable 
to the attainment of the highest results, remains 
for us to consider. It is the disposition to dis- 
cover, before it is too late, what are those 
principles and disciplines which underlie and 
condition deeper understanding and adequate 
elucidation of the texts with which the English 
teacher has to deal. Here let us recall Bacon's 
anecdote of Sir Amyas Paulet, who when he saw 




,130 THE GRADUATE STUDY OF ENGLISH 

too much haste made in any matter, was wont to 
say, i Stay a while, that we may make an end 
the sooner.' And a particular application of it, 
which can hardly be too much pondered, is also 
from Bacon : ■ ' Another error ... is that . . . 
men have abandoned universality, or prima philo- 
sophia ; which cannot but cease and stop all pro- 
gression. For no perfect discovery can be made 
upon a flat or level ; neither is it possible to dis- 
cover the more remote and deeper parts of any 
science, if you stand but upon the level of the 
same science, and ascend not to a higher sci- 
ence.' 

Without insisting too much upon Bacon's 
prima philosophia, we shall be ready, I suppose, 
to grant that there are disciplines or branches 
of knowledge which, were it possible to compass 
them, would be of extreme utility to the profes- 
sional student of literature. I have heard liter- 
ary persons plume themselves upon a supposed 
congenital inability to comprehend mathematics. 
Again on this point let us hear Bacon, a scholar 
incapable neither of mathematics nor of liter- 
ature : 2 ' Men do not sufficiently understand the 
excellent use of the pure mathematics, in that 
they do remedy and cure many defects in the 
wit and faculties intellectual. For if the wit be 
too dull, they sharpen it ; if too wandering, they 
1 Adv. Learn., Bk. 1. 2 Ibid. 2. 8. 2. 



AUXILIARY DISCIPLINES 131 

fix it ; if too inherent in the sense, they abstract 
it. So that as tennis is a game of no use in it- 
self, but of great use in respect it maketh a 
quick eye, and a body ready to put itself into all 
postures, so in the mathematics that use which 
is collateral and intervenient is no less worthy 
than that which is principal and intended.' So 
elsewhere Bacon says, in a familiar passage : ' 
'If a man's wit be wandering, let him study 
the mathematics, for in demonstration, if his wit 
be called away never so little, he must begin 
again ; if his wit be not able to distinguish or 
find differences, let him study the schoolmen, for 
they are cymini sectores. If he be not apt to 
beat over matters, and to call upon one thing to 
prove and illustrate another, let him study the 
lawyers' cases ; so every defect of the mind may 
have a special receipt.' 

In speaking of these disciplinary subjects, 
I must not be understood to advocate that all 
of them shall be employed in the case of every 
candidate for an English professorship, though 
perhaps the error would not be worse than 
that which Bacon elsewhere reprehends, when he 
says : 2 ' In the handling of this science, those 
which have written seem to me to have done as 
if a man that professed to teach to write did 
only exhibit fair copies of alphabets and letters 

1 Of Studies. 2 Adv. Learn. 2. 20. 1. 



132 THE GRADUATE STUDY OF ENGLISH 

joined, without giving any precepts or directions 
for the carriage of the hand and framing of the 
letters.' To apply this to our own branch, it is 
not sufficient to say : * Here is the body of English 
literature; come and read it, and then go and 
teach it.' No, various prerequisites are implied, 
and in a given case they might even be best 
secured by training in a physical science. Cer- 
tain it is that the graduate student who in my 
experience accomplished the most — quantity 
and quality both considered — in the least time, 
was one who had been trained in experimental 
biology. But, whether the propaedeutic ideally 
required be mathematics, or science, or philoso- 
phy, at all events, if we detect in the student 
certain ' stonds or impediments,' as Bacon calls 
them, we should either suggest that they be re- 
moved by some extraneous discipline, or else, as 
far as possible, ourselves devise the means by 
which they may be ' wrought out,' only bearing 
in mind the extreme difficulty of removing all 
sorts of stonds or impediments through the 
agency of English alone. So far as linguistic 
discipline is efficacious in these respects — and 
on other accounts as well — it is desirable, I 
believe, that there shall be for the graduate 
student a requirement with respect to the sight- 
reading of French, German, and Latin of average 
difficulty, and that the examination in this shall 



DISCIPLINE UNDERTAKEN BY ORATORS 133 

be passed at the beginning of his course, or in 
any case not less than two academic years before 
he takes his degree. 

Though the province of the English teacher 
and that of the parliamentary orator are not 
identical, yet the two have much in common, so 
that we may, perhaps, profitably remind our- 
selves of the amount and kind of labor under- 
gone by some of the great English orators in 
preparation for their triumphs. Lord Chatham 
translated repeatedly from the orations of De- 
mosthenes, learned by heart many of the sermons 
of Barrow, and went twice through the largest 
English dictionary then extant, scrutinizing 
every word in order, with its various meanings 
and modes of construction. One of his biogra- 
phers says of him : ' Probably no man of genius 
since the days of Cicero has ever submitted to 
an equal amount of drudgery.' * Charles James 
Fox was so thoroughly grounded in Latin and 
Greek from boyhood that he read them through- 
out life much as he read English ; but, we are 
told, 8 he always felt the want of an early train- 
ing in scientific investigation, correspondent to 
that he received in classical literature.' 2 For 
many years William Pitt devoted himself to 
'the classics, the mathematics, and the logic of 

1 Goodrich, Select British Eloquence, pp. 52-3. 

2 Ibid., pp. 438-9. 



134 THE GRADUATE STUDY OF ENGLISH 

Arisotle applied to the purposes of debate.' * 
Perhaps these examples will suffice to show how 
far these great orators were from preparing them- 
selves for their careers by the mere reading of 
English literature. 

But besides the more disciplinary auxiliaries, 
there are certain branches of knowledge with 
which the deeper sort of English student needs 
to be acquainted. How could one, for instance, 
who knew nothing at first hand about the litera- 
ture of Old French or Italian — to say nothing 
of Latin — go profoundly into Chaucer? And 
again, besides these, there are the methodical 
inquiries, such as those into the theory of lit- 
erary study and the theory of English study 
taken as a whole, which are almost indispensa- 
ble at the outset. As many as possible of these 
fundamental courses should be taken, I am in- 
clined to think, at the beginning, and this for 
two reasons. If they are really fundamental, 
there will be constant use and application of 
them later, so that they can hardly be begun too 
soon. This is the first reason. The other is that 
which, if report be true, has actuated many edi- 
tors in dealing with young men who wished to 
enter journalism, as well as theatrical managers 
in their interviews with aspirants to histrionic 
honors. It is that the person who mistakes a 

1 Goodrich, Select British Eloquence, p. 552. 



UNQUALIFIED ASPIRANTS 135 

velleity for a determination may be deterred at 
the outset from undertaking a career for which 
he is not fitted. There is no place in our pro- 
fession for the sybaritic individual who merely 
wishes lazily to read pleasant books, and the 
sooner he can be turned to the right about, the 
better. At the risk of seeming to indulge in 
paradox, I will hasten to add that he who has not 
been a passionate reader of good literature from 
the age of ten, or thereabouts, up to the timd 
that he begins graduate study, and who does nofl 
give promise of remaining a passionate reader! 
of good literature to the end of life, should be 
gently, but firmly, discouraged from entering 
our profession. Such a person will certainly not 
have the enthusiasm which will carry him through 
the necessary toils, just as the shallow person, of 
whom I spoke above, will not have the insight to 
perceive what the necessary toils are. The oft- 
repeated story of the celebrated Porpora may 
be in point here, not only as showing the mas- 
tership requisite on the part of the teacher, but 
especially the enthusiasm and patience neces- 
sary on the part of the learner. The latest form 
in which I have seen the story is as follows: 

It is said that a young man went to Porpora, who 
was one of the famous teachers at the beginning of 
the eighteenth century, and asked for tuition. Por- 
pora replied that he would accept the youth as a pupil 



136 THE GRADUATE STUDY OF ENGLISH 

only on condition that the student would agree to 
do precisely as the teacher told him. The youth con- 
sented, and the master wrote some exercises for him 
on four pages of music-paper. At the end of three 
years the young man was still studying this sheet. 
He called his teacher's attention to the fact, and Por- 
pora said, ' Remember your promise.' At the end 
of the sixth year the young man went to his teacher 
in despair. He was still on the same sheet, and he 
was ready to abandon the struggle and throw himself 
into the river, when, to his surprise, Porpora said : 
1 Now, my son, you may go. You are the greatest 
singer in the world.' The teacher had written on 
that paper everything that could be done by a human 
voice, and Caff arelli, afterwards known as the Prince 
of Song, had mastered all. 

We shall know the right-minded student by 
his recognizing, when it is presented to him, the 
truth of Aristotle's precept : x i We must . . . con- 
sider towards which extreme it is that we our- 
selves are the most inclined to drift, for no two 
men have the same natural bent. Our test herein 
will be the pleasure or the pain which we feel 
upon each occasion. And we must strive to drag 
ourselves to exactly the counter course, much 
as they do who straighten warped timbers.' 2 

1 Nic. Eth. 2. 9. 5. 

2 With this compare Ruskin's manuscript addition to Sesame 
and Lilies, Lecture HI, § 122 ( Works, ed. Cook and Wedder- 
burn, 18, 169) : ' Remember that all teaching that is true is 



UNQUALIFIED ASPIRANTS 137 

With respect to the desirability of a love for 
good literature, and a considerable acquaintance 
with it, on the part of the person who under- 
takes graduate study, we must remember that 
in three years only a limited number of course- 1 
hours can be taken to advantage, considering the I 
severe demands made by each, and the amount J 
of collateral reading they should require. I my-/ 
self have been accustomed to reckon them as' 
twenty, distributed through the successive years 
as about eight, eight, and four. This affords a 
minimum of time for the compassing of every- 
thing desirable, and therefore makes it indis- 
pensable to exclude the person who has to ac- 
quire in his graduate years a love for literature 
and a respectable acquaintance with it. If he 
must do this at such a late day, he will have 
time for nothing else. All the English litera- 
ture that he openly pursues during this period 

in a measure startling. Of the best and perfeetest knowledge 
it is said, " Such knowledge is too wonderful for me " [Ps. 
139. 6] ; but in its own measure all knowledge is wonderful. 
To learn the vivid radical meaning of a familiar word, to get 
sight of a new feature or harmony in a natural object, to ap- 
prehend the bearing of an unknown law — all these things are 
wonderful ; and of any teacher who is rightly helping you, you 
ought always to feel, not " how right that is ; I always thought 
that" — no — but "how strange that is; I never thought of 
that." But it follows, therefore, that all true teaching must 
be very slow, for you cannot receive many new thoughts or 
facts at once.' 



138 THE GRADUATE STUDY OF ENGLISH 

should be in strictly methodical courses, such as 
will induct him into scholarly and pedagogical 
processes. 

/ It may be objected that I lay too much stress 
/ipon the disciplinary side of graduate study. 
But to myself I seem to be in accord with all the 
chief theorists who have treated of Art in rela- 
tion to Nature. All agree that the richest soil 
may produce abundant crops, though perhaps 
plentifully sprinkled with weeds, with little or no 
cultivation, just as very likely there have been 
and are most inspiring teachers of English who 
have had little of the training outlined above. 
All agree that moderately rich soil demands 
more continuous and careful culture. And all 
agree that a naturally thin and barren soil can 
be made to produce respectable crops only by 
the application of the most perfect means which 
science has at its disposal. I have never seen a 
soil too well cultivated, and I have never seen a 
teacher too well trained ; but I have seen soils 
that produced poor crops in spite of thorough 
tillage, and I have seen teachers, to whom Heaven 
has denied temperament and intuition, who could 
never equal the performances of a Socrates, or a 
Mark Hopkins, or a James McCosh, if they had 
been trained by the greatest master of pedagogi- 
cal science that ever lived. 

And now, as we approach the end of this hur- 



THE BOND OF UNITY 139 

ried, though perhaps tedious, survey, we may 
perhaps ask how the bond of the varied exer- 
cises which we have recommended may be made 
to appear, especially as so many of these must 
be detailed and analytical. How shall the stu- 
dent be preserved from distraction and bewilder- 
ment? This is best done, I believe, by making 
the ground-tone of all the study one of synthesis 
and unity. A philosophical spirit should, if pos- \ 
sible, pervade the entire instruction, even when 
scientific processes are most in evidence. If this 
is done, and sufficient opportunity is afforded 
the student to question his teacher concerning 
the relation of a given part to the ideal whole, 
he is not likely to fight as one that beateth the 
air, but every blow will stand a good chance of 
being delivered home. 

Akin to this mode of procedure on the part 
of the teacher is another on the part of the stu- 
dent, and of no less importance. It is that which 
Bacon proposes, if I may once more quote him: 1 
4 Wherefore we will conclude with that last point, 
which is of all other means the most compen- 
dious and summary, and again the most noble 
and effectual to the reducing of the mind unto 
virtue and good estate ; which is, the electing and 
propounding unto a man's self good and virtuous 
ends of his life, such as may be in a reasonable 

1 Adv. Learn. 2. 22. 15. 



140 THE GRADUATE STUDY OF ENGLISH 

sort within his compass to obtain.' But, since 
Bacon may seem antiquated, and certainly igno- 
rant of our peculiar circumstances, give me leave 
to conclude with certain stanzas from a poem 
read before the Phi Beta Kappa society of Tufts 
College, 1 in June of the year just expired : 

Libraries, tomes, we may command 
Through him who wields the Midas-hand. 
Who would command the sages may ; 
But who shall give us the desire 
To light a torch at wisdom's fire ? 



The dregs of all the nations here 
May seethe and fuse for many a year 
In this dull mass of commonness ; 
Yet by-and-by, to earth's surprise, 
Another type may crystallize. 

So, mad the rush and fierce the game, 
Till time shall this rude instinct tame, 
And men a deeper need discern, 
And burn to spend themselves to give 
Diviner joys to all that live. 

A remnant is our hope — elect, 
Distinct, high-minded, circumspect, 
With grace and power to lead, and turn 
Ambition's self to grander goals, 
Unsought, unknown of meaner souls. 

1 Dwight M. Hodge, No Boom at the Inn, and Other Poems, 
Boston, 1905. 



NO SINGLE GOOD HIS VISION FILLS' 141 

And of that remnant, sane and sound, 
For ever be the Scholar found ! 
No single good his vision fills ; 
Nor his the need all strength to spend 
Toward one self-seeking, vulgar end. 

How shall this common mass be led, 
Made wistful after more than bread, 
Shown the true sense of all its ills ; 
How shall the larger vision come, 
If learning's oracles be dumb ? 



'T is ours, O brothers, to begin 
To bring a new republic in, 
To make the noblest autocrat; 
To win new love for art and song ; 
To show the gentlest may be strong ; 

To make a knighthood of great souls, 
Whom honor's finer sense controls — 
No petty priests of small reforms, 
But men who know the one deep need 
Of larger life with grander deed ; 

To find new ways to Arcady, 
Though men deny such land may be ; 
To all that kindles, all that warms, 
To all who dream, and all who sing, 
To give a royal welcoming. 



INDEX 



Adams, John Couch, 76. 

jElfric, 39. 

Alfred, King, 3S, 39. 

Anglo-Saxon. See Old English. 

Aristotle, 17, 67, 122, 134 ; quoted, 

136. 
Arnold, Matthew, 73, 78. 
Azarias, Brother, 40. 

Bacon, Francis, 60, 122 ; quoted, 130 
ff., 139. 

Barrow, Isaac, 133. 

Bartlett, John, 22, 96. 

Battle of Brunanburh. See Tenny- 
son. 

Bede, 37. 

Boeckh, his classical conception of 
philology, 29. 

Boethius, 38. 

Brandl, Alois, 22. 

Brooke, Stopford, 22. 

Browning, Robert, 5, 70; his at- 
titude toward philology, 15, 25; 
quoted, 23. 

Brunetiere, Ferdinand, 127. 

Burke, Edmund, 5, 16, 23, 42, 68 ; a 
student of philology, 14. 

Caedmon, English literature may be 

said to begin with, 37. 
Caffarelli, Gaetano, 136. 
Calverley, Charles S., 112. 
Carlyle, Thomas, 111. 
' Cataract ' 71. 

Celtic eloquence, 78, 79, 86, 87. 
Chapman, George, quoted, 25. 
Chatham, Lord, his preparation for 

an oratorical career, 89 ff . , 133. 
Chaucer, 23, 67, 122. 
Child, Francis J., a philologist, 22. 
Christianity, relation of, to English 

literature and the teaching of, 

41 ff., 45. 
Cicero, 23, 33, 68 ; a student of 

philology, 12. 
Clubs, 128. 
Club spirit, its relation to the study 

of English, 124 ff. 



Composition, Milton's views con- 
cerning, 65, 66. 
Concordances needed, 95, 128. 
Croiset, Alfred, a philologist, 24. 
Cuvier, 73. 

Dante, 67, 68, 69, 103 ; a student of 
philology, 13. 

Delight, how to combine with dis- 
cipline is a problem, 62. 

Demosthenes, 133. 

Dictionaries, 89, 128, 133. 

Discipline, in the study of English, 
138 ; how to combine with de- 
light is a problem, 62. 

Dowden, Edward, a philologist, 22 ; 
quoted, 26. 

Dryden, John, 5 ; a student of phi- 
lology, 15. 

' Elf,' 96. 

Ellis, Frederick S., a philologist, 22, 
96. 

Elze, Karl, agrees with Boeckh, 29. 

Emerson, Ralph W., 111. 

English, aims in the graduate study 
of, 101 ff. ; causes for increasing 
study of, 45 ff . ; college entrance 
requirements in, 53 ff. ; defects in 
the teaching of, 59 ff. ; demands 
upon university teacher of, 118 ff . ; 
difficulties in the proper teaching 
of, 46 ff . ; how the university 
teacher of, may be trained, 124 ff.; 
in the primary schools, 52 ; in the 
secondary schools, 52 ; place to be 
held by the teacher of, 109 ff., 
116 ff . ; reassuring conditions con- 
cerning, 70 ; results accomplished 
in the fostering of, as an academic 
subject, 56 ff . ; the teaching of, 37 ff . 

English literature, beginnings of, 37. 

English philology, the province of, 
3ff. 

English scholarship, beginnings of, 
39 ; democratic, 40. 

Erasmus a philologist, 24. 

Euripides, 122. 



144 



INDEX 



Evolution, relation of, to the study 
of English, 124 ff. 

' Fairy,' 76. 
Fox, Charles J., 133. 
Foxe, John, 39. 
Franklin, Benjamin, 41. 
Furness, William H., a philologist, 
22. 

Genesis, Old Saxon, 75. 

Gildersleeve, Basil L., a philologist, 
24. 

4 Gleam,' 80 ff. 

'Gnome,' 96. 

Goethe, 69. 

Graduate study of English, aims in, 
101 ff . ; cf . 70. 

Grammar, Milton's view of, 12, 65. 

Greek, at Princeton University, 116 ; 
Chatham's, Fox's, and Pitt's 
study of, 133, 134 ; present un- 
popularity of, 114 ff . 

Greek elements in modern life, 125. 

Greek study of literature, 63, 64. 

Gregory, Pope, 37. 

Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, 23. 

Grober, Gustav, 29. 

Grotius, Hugo, philologist, 24. 

Guillaume de Lorris, 67. 

Hakluyt, Richard, 39. 

Historians, 104. 

Hodge, Dwight M., quoted, 140. 

Homer, 23, 68, 105, 106 ; in educa- 
tion, 63. 

Hopkins, Mark, 138. 

Horace, 64, 105. 

Humanitarianism and English liter- 
ature, 44. 

Humanities, expounders of the, 
104 ff. 

Immanence of the Deity, its relation 
to the study of English, 124 ff. 

Individualism, its relation to the 
study of English, 41, 43, 45. 

Intensive study, 73 ff . 

Italian, 134. 

Jebb, Richard, a philologist, 24 ; 

quoted, 63. 
Jefferson, Thomas, 42. 
Johnson, Samuel, a philologist, 22. 
Jonson, Ben, a student of philology, 

14, 22. 
Joscelin, John, 39. 
Joubert, Joseph, quoted, 82 ff . 
Jowett, Benjamin, a philologist, 24. 



Julius Caesar, a student of philology, 

12. 
Juvenal, 122. 

Keats, John, 68, 115. 
Kdrting, Gustav, agrees with 
Boeckh, 29. 

Lambarde, William, 139. 

Latin, 116, 133 ; teachers of, 108. 

Learners, great, what they learn, 68. 

Legouis, Emile, 127. 

Leland, John, 39. 

Leverrier, Urbain, 76. 

Lewes, George H., 22. 

Lexicons needed, 95. 

Linguistics, one reason for study- 
ing, 106 ff. ; literary, 30, 98. 

Literature, teachers of, 105 ff . ; to 
what end and how to be taught, 
63 ff. ; how learned by Dante, 
Chaucer, Spenser, Burke, Tenny- 
son, 67 ff. 

Locke, John, quoted, 41. 

Logic, 66, 134. 

Longinus, 122 ; quoted, 24. 

Lowell, James R., advocates the 
teaching of the ancient classics, 69. 

McCosh, James, 138. 
McLaughlin, Edward T., 18. 
Mahaffy, John P., a philologist, 24. 
Marston, John, quoted, 82. 
Mathematics, its relation to the 

study of English, 130 ff., 134. 
Methodology, 134 ; cf . 120. 
Milton, John, 68, 76, 105, 122; a 

student of philology, 12 ; on 

the teaching of English, 64 ff . ; 

quoted, 84, 101. 
Minister of religion, the, 103, 109. 
Minor writers, 5. 
Modern languages, teachers of, 108, 

113. 
Moliere, 69, 122. 
Morel, Leon A., 127. 
Miiller, Max, a philologist, 24. 
Murray, James A. H., a philologist, 

22. 
' Music,' 97. 

National life in relation to the 
teaching of literature, 70, 102, 122. 

Nationality, spirit of, in relation to 
the study of English, 41, 45. 

Newman, John H., 23, 111. 

Old English, revival of, 39 ; chair 
of, at University of Virginia, 42 ; 



INDEX 



145 



literature, brief survey of, 37 ff . ; 

ability to read, 120, 122. 
Old French, 134. 
Oratio, relation to ratio, 31 . 
Osgood, Charles G., quoted, 66 ff. 
Ovid, 67. 

Palmer, George H., quoted, 5. 
Pan, illustration from statues of, 77. 
Paris, Gaston, a philologist, 27. 
Parker, Matthew, 39. 
Pater, Walter, a philologist, 22. 
Paul the apostle, quoted, 117. 
Paul, Hermann, agrees with Boeckh, 

29. 
Petrarch, 67, 106 ; a philologist, 23. 
Philanthropy, relation to the study 

of English, 125 ff . 
Philology, the province of English, 

3 ff. ; criticism of, 3 ff . ; not to be 

identified with linguistics, 27 ; 

etymological significance of the 

word, 29 ff . ; true conception of, 

19 ff., 31 ff. 
Philosophy, 10, 139 ; relation to the 

study of English, 61 ; utilitarian, 

41, 45 ; teachers of, 104. 
Pitt, William, 133. 
Plato, 69, 104; quoted, 63, 97. 
Plautus, 106. 
Plutarch, 64. 
Poet, the, 103, 110 ff. 
Politian, a philologist, 23. 
Porpora, Nicolo, anecdote of, 135. 
Pronunciation, Milton's view of, 65. 
Protestantism, relation of, to the 

study of English, 38 ff., 45. 

Quintilian, quoted, 12. 

Ratio, relation to oratio, 31. 

Reformation, the, 38. 

Rhetoric, recent teaching of, 51, 59, 

70. 
Romanticism, 43. 
Rousseau, 43. 
Ruskin, John, 42, 111 ; quoted, 136. 

Sainte-Beuve, Charles A., a philolo- 
gist, 24. 

Saintsbury, George, quoted, 27. 

Schipper, Joseph, a philologist, 22. 

Schmidt, Alexander, a philologist, 
22. 

Schoolmen, 131. 

Science, relation of, to the study of 
English, 6, 41, 42, 46, 60, 124 ff. , 132. 

Sellar, William Y., a philologist, 24. 

Seneca, 16, 17 ; quoted, 7 8. . 



Shakespeare, 42, 69, 76, 104, 106 ; 

quoted, 115. 
Shorey, Paul, his edition of Horace, 

105. 
Sidney, Philip, a philologist, 22. 
Sievers, Edward, 22, 75, 70. 
Skeat, Walter W., a philologist, 22. 
Skelton, 122. 
Socrates, 138. 
Sophocles, 122. 
Spenser, Edmund, 67, 76, 122. 
Spiritual leaders, need of, 101 ; 

three classes of, 102. 
State, the, and the university, 102, 

122. 
Strangford, Lord, 73. 
Swift, Jonathan, 5; a student of 

philology, 15. 
Synthesis, place of, in the study of 

English, 139. 

Taine, Hippolyte, a philologist, 22. 

Tasso, 67, 122. 

Ten Brink, Bernhardt a philologist, 

22. 
Tennyson, 25, 68 ; illustrations from, 

78 ff. ; his Merlin and The Gleam, 

79 ff. ; linguistic analysis of its 
first stanza, 87 ff . ; his Battle of 
Brunanburh, 89 ff. 

Terence, 106. 

Texte, Joseph, 127. 

Theory of poetry, 134 ; Milton's 

view of, 66. 
Training through English, 62 ff., 

131 ff. 
Twain, Mark, quoted, 113. 
Tyrwhitt, Thomas, a philologist, 24. 

University must train spiritual 

leaders, 102. 
University of Virginia, chair of 

Anglo-Saxon at, 42. 
Utilitarianism, 41, 45. 

Virgil, 67, 68, 122. 

Wesley, John, 43. 

'Wilderness,' 96. 

Wilson, Woodrow, quoted, 4 ff., 16. 

Wolf, Priedrich A., outlined the con- 
ception of philology, 29. 

Woman, relation of, to the study of 
English, 41, 44, 45. 

Words, the relation of, to literature, 
73 ff . ; study of, 79 ff . 

Wordsworth, 68; quoted, 81. 

Xenophon, quoted, 63. 



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